Power of Media: Secular Challenge & A Christian Response [Full Text]

A personal departure point: I was born into a lost media generation
of Apartheid South Africa, a generation deprived of the basic right to
take on the responsibilities of being information agents that educate
and inform in order to empower. We were operating in a schizophrenic
society, a “pigmentocracy”, as a South African liberation theologian
puts it, in which the color of your skin determined your position in
the haves-and-have-nots world. A society in which a powerful minority
was oppressing and abusing a powerless majority that lost political and
economic control and resulted in socio-religious domination.
 
It gave birth to two-faced nation, one being the face of poverty and
deprivation, the other the face of wealth, privilege and white
capitalist supremacy. This political aberration was kept alive by a
support system in which the security forces and the information system,
the media, were vital instruments. The job of the journalist was not to
witness and inform but to justify and to manipulate. And remember I’m
talking about mainstream media. I’m not talking about alternative
media.
 
Journalists were not serving democracy and therefore the interests
of all of society, but serving the interests of those with power, both
political and economic. For me studying the context in which South
African media operates today, fifteen years later, is like looking into
a two-way mirror. And it many ways it stirs up a deep sense of déjà vu.
Over the past fifteen years, the media have undergone a revolution in
structure, interactivity and reach. There has been greater freedom of
expression and information, and this industry has indeed become
dynamic, popular, creative and commercially very, very complex.
 
The liberation of the media, as was the liberation of the nation,
particularly the broadcast media, has been partial, haphazard and
evolutionary rather than revolutionary. There’s that word again
“revolutionary”. We have won the battle on media-freedom legislation,
but we are losing the war on democratic transformation within the
media.
 
The new South African order is still split into a two-tiered
structure. One tier has a full and expanding range of social and
economic amenities, and the other with a declining share of both but
also with a growing amount of “junk food” — junk entertainment and junk
information. And, ladies and gentlemen, I can’t tell you how strongly I
feel about tabloid press in communities that are already not empowered.

 
The tension between democracy and exploitative capitalism — and I
say “exploitative capitalism” because I’m not one of those people who
says we should just do away with capitalism, but if it exploits, I will
challenge it – is becoming increasingly evident and communication,
media in other words, so necessary to both can hardly serve two
masters.