The media is missing the woods for the trees

For a profession not renowned for reflection, the media has opened itself up to some serious soul searching over the last few weeks. Sadly, the introspection has not gone beyond the rather self-righteous ponderings over whether or not journalists should reveal their sources to the bigger issues raised, like whose interests individual media practitioners, let alone the industry itself, are really serving.

For a profession not renowned for reflection, the media has opened itself up to some serious soul searching over the last few weeks. Sadly, the introspection has not gone beyond the rather self-righteous ponderings over whether or not journalists should reveal their sources to the bigger issues raised, like whose interests individual media practitioners, let alone the industry itself, are really serving.

These are pertinent issues at a time when the other major concerns of the moment are gender violence and HIV/AIDS: two of the most problematic areas of media coverage.

Let’s start with the media’s preoccupation with the circus in Bloemfontein. By now, the facts are pretty well known.

Ranjeni Munusamy, former ace reporter of the Sunday Times, avails a half- baked story about the director of public prosecutions, Bulelani Ngcuka, being an ex-spy to a rival newspaper after her then editor, Mathatha Tsedu, refuses to publish it. The freedom of expression institutions rally around her when she gets called to testify at the Hefer Commission, where the main sources (or sauces?) of the story reveal themselves anyway.

Meanwhile, the editor who published her story, Vusi Mona, falls over himself to reveal the contents of a confidential briefing by Ngcuka, tripping badly, perhaps even perjuring himself in the process.

The media is in a frenzy: ambivalent in its attitude towards Munusamy and her case; distancing itself from Mona and his breaching of the unwritten rules of a confidential briefing. The analysts and a fair proportion of the public are asking: why the heck should the media be above the law, when it has the power in one stroke of a pen to destroy reputations and cause multi million Rand investigations?

Lost in the flurry by the media to protect the media’s "rights" is any discussion about its obligations: personal integrity, for example. What caused Munusamy and Mona to behave the way they did, and whose interests were they serving? Surely for media houses that pride themselves on exposing corruption, this is the more pertinent question.

In explaining why he suspended Munusamy, Tsedu said the Sunday Times answered only to its readers. Weeks later, he had lost his job, in an unrelated set of events that apparently added up to the fact that he had not answered to the paper’s advertisers. Whether the paper’s readers and the advertisers interests are one and the same, we the public can only guess.

What is puzzling is that the freedom of expression lot had little to say about how free is freedom when an editor of Tesdu’s calibre, so brilliantly demonstrated in his handling of the Munusamy case, gets the sack for "dumbing" down a newspaper.

Also lost in the hype of the last few weeks, but not on individual editors who attended the briefing in large numbers at the Nelson Mandela Foundation on World Aids Day is the recent study by the University of Witwatersrand on coverage of HIV/AIDS. Some salient facts:
· Since the controversy and court case over the roll out of nevirapine last year, coverage on HIV/AIDS has dropped dramatically in volume.
· There has been far more coverage on the controversy around, than on the disease itself.
· In audience research carried out in Cato Manor, Durban, where 35 percent of the 120,000 strong community is HIV/AIDS positive, respondents said they had never seen a reporter in their midst, let alone heard their stories told.
· Instead, their local newspapers regularly served up an advert about a miracle man who could cure the disease, without ever investigating this.
· What did they most want to know about? Treatment. The least covered story: Treatment.

The media fraternity present congratulated themselves on getting President Thabo Mbeki to change his mind (though some pointed out he had changed his position, not his mind) on HIV/AIDS, while skirting the gulf between the media and the public on one of the most pressing issues of the day.

Struggling even more than HIV/AIDS to find its way into the news is the Sixteen Days of Activism Against Gender Violence that runs from late November to early December, and is the one window in the year when the most blatant, but under-reported human rights violation in South Africa, gets a few inches and air time.

Some media houses have done a commendable job of getting to the issues and a Sunday paper had the guts to make the fight against gender violence front- page news.

Yet the media continues to send out conflicting messages about women as objects (like the back page of the Sunday Times that Tsedu sadly did not succeed in "dumbing" down), then as victims, then as human beings who have rights after all.

Consider, for example, a story about a woman who is accused of witchcraft because she refused to sleep with a man that runs side by side with a pin up of half naked "Minki" against the caption "mainly for men."

Or the offering this week in another newspaper under the headline "Rapist ‘compassionate’ " about a serial rapist who thinks he should get a lighter sentence because he was "not violent" that answers to all the research findings on gender violence coverage: written from the courts; written entirely from the perspective of a perpetrator; victims mentioned as witnesses but not quoted; no comments from human rights or women’s rights organisations.

It’s great that the South African media is mobilised around professional values, ethics and standards. This means a lot more than protecting your sources. It is also about who your sources are in the first place, whom you seek to inform, about what, through their voices.

Colleen Lowe Morna is director of Gender Links.

This article is part of the GEM Opinion and Commentary Service that provides views and perspectives on current events.

janine@genderlinks.org.za for more information.