Black Wednesday, White Lies - Reflections on Media Freedom

Read Time:8 Minute, 2 Second

Black Wednesday is the day to commemorate the silencing of dissent by the Apartheid government. This is a weapon of the weak and the fearful. And so it was a cowardly display of brutishness on October 19 1977, when the Apartheid regime banned nineteen Black Consciousness organizations in South Africa. Included in the blunt instrument of censorship was the banning of two newspapers – The World and The Weekend World. This day became known as “Black Wednesday”, and in a post-apartheid South Africa, was remixed and rejigged to become “Media Freedom Day”.

Commemorations are all to easily decontextualized, divorced from history, or even compromised as to completely erase the historical basis of their existence. This happens in South Africa, where Shaka Day became Heritage Day, and then became Braai Day. It happens in Ghana, where Founder’s Day is being watered down by attempts to include lesser lights in the same standing as Kwame Nkrumah.

And it’s also happening with Black Wednesday, which morphed into a festival of media patting itself on the back and telling itself that it is indeed a very good boy.

So let’s talk about Media Freedom, for whom it exists, and what are the interests that are served by this ideal in the context of the Global South.

The Media Landscape in Africa – InfoColonialism in Action

At first blush, Africa has a vibrant and diverse mediascape. There are thousands of online and print newspapers on the continent. There are around 600 television stations in Africa, and increasing. Nigeria alone had 625 broadcasting tv and radio entities before the regulator approved a further 159 new outfits.

Even though the digital footprint is increasing, radio reigns supreme in Africa. It is the most used mass communication medium on the continent. Radios are portable, low cost, and most importantly, never run out of data.

But platforms are only as good as their curators, and herein lies the rub. Just as there is contestation by former colonial powers to monopolize the benefits of Africa’s commodities and raw materials, there is also a push to impose western hegemonic worldviews on African media. This is an agenda that dictates how Africans should see themselves, how they should see the world, and how Africans should orient themselves within a framework of western norms, conventions, and assumptions. This is accomplished through a network of mainly white, mainly western, and mainly liberal funding networks, many of whom are intricately tied to the US State Department.

The National Endowment For Democracy – Chokepoint of REAL Media Freedom

The shadow of Uncle Sam looms large over media operations in Africa. A recent article I wrote for the Irish Chapter of the Network In Defence of Humanity spells out the involvement of the National Endowment for Democracy (effectively a reskinned version of the CIA’s media manipulation operation) in the global South.

“The NED funds and has funded particular media in specific countries such as the investigative journalism outfit Bellingcat in the Netherlands (which also has connections to Western intelligence agencies), openDemocracy in the United Kingdom, the Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism in Nigeria, and the Centre for Media Excellence in Uganda, which also works in Kenya and Tanzania.
In the Southern African region examples of NED media funding include:

• the local chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa in Swaziland
• the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism in South Africa
• The Continent, the weekly pan-African publication run by the Mail & Guardian in South Africa
In South Africa the publication of most concern is the Mail & Guardian, where The Continent is directly funded by the NED, and two former editors have gone on to work for NED funded organisations.
Chris Roper was the editor of the Mail and Guardian from 2009 – 2015, and then left to become the Deputy CEO of Code for Africa, whose umbrella organization is funded by the NED. His successor, Khadija Patel resigned as M&G editor in 2020 to become the chairperson of the NED-backed International Center for Journalists and a media funding operation that is bankrolled by the NED.”
Excerpt from “THE IMPERIAL THUMB ON THE SCALE – HOW THE NED DISTORTS DEMOCRATIC DISCOURSE IN AFRICA AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH” by Roscoe Palm

Black Wednesday and Minority Rule

The liberal hegemonic view is a minority view in Africa. The chattering class captains impose their primacy over the working class by manufacturing an impression of mass consensus. There is not an effort to understand why ordinary people hold the worldviews that they do, how these views come to be fostered, or even how an audience who holds a particular basket of ideas can come to be hijacked by fascists. Instead, there is a condescension from these self-appointed liberal guardians of western hegemonic media wherever a reasoned dissenting view that challenges their orthodoxies arise. Liberal media exists in a bubble of its own making, so convinced of the virtue and the effectiveness of its proselytization to the “unwashed, unsophisticated, and uneducated” masses that it has developed a syndrome of blaming the people, concocting conspiracy theories, and ascribing their failures to the nefarious actions of “rogue state actors”. Liberal media will go to almost any lengths to exonerate itself of responsibility for its factory faults. But it will not engage in self-examination and introspection when confronted with the cognitive dissonance between what it wishcasts, and the cold hard reality.

Oftentimes what it deems important to itself is light years away from what is important to the majority of people. A fine example of this would be the case of Karyn Maughan being taken to court by former South African president Jacob Zuma. This is just another delaying tactic by President Zuma to kick justice into touch, but the liberal media in South Africa have been absolutely hysterical in their overwrought attempts to portray this as Maughan marching into Mordor to toss the One Ring into the volcano of justice. It’s really not that deep. It’s quite clear that Maughan will win, because Zuma’s case is held together by spit and cheap sticky tape. But that doesn’t mean that Maughan cannot be taken to court, where the principle of Audi Alterum Partem is paramount, and in fact benefits Maughan. This principle of hearing both sides is one that is entirely optional in journalism.

Journalism in Africa is a club, and holding court over this exclusive club is a cohort of mainly white liberal men – editors, funders, and foreigners – who hold views that are completely at odds with the sovereign path that African nations and their people are walking. This exclusive club highlights wars and struggles of European interest, for example they condescend and wag their fingers at Africans for not precisely toeing the line that the US State Department dictates about Ukraine, but they say nothing about Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine. They make martyrs out of Maughan and tweet that “Journalism Is Not A Crime”, but they conveniently forget Julian Assange rots in Belmarsh Prison since 2019 for doing the kind of journalism that should win Pulitzers, not earn prison sentences. They cancel individuals like Katie Halper for delivering a truthful and scathing assessment of Israel as an apartheid state. Somewhere, every day of the week is Black Wednesday.

Towards a Truly Free Media

To these liberals, media freedom means their freedom to be prescriptive to an ideology. It does not mean that they should adhere to the journalistic rigor of being descriptive of a situation. It presents stories out of historical and political context. It skews facts, massages polls and angles stories to its prejudices and preferences, and when the chickens come home to lay egg on their collective previously smug faces, they merely shrug, blameshift, dismiss it as an anomaly, and move on to the next episode. We’ve seen this on an ever increasing basis – the election of Trump, Brexit, the continuous befuddlement of the chattering classes with why ANC voters vote for the ANC, to mention a few scenarios.

Audiences aren’t stupid, no matter how they are infantilized by the media. Audiences have been let down by a coterie of experts, editors, and journalists, who instead of reporting stories have lately settled on curating narratives. Although there are many outlets, and many voices, there is only one acceptable script for any media house – the one written in Washington and Brussels.

For true media freedom to flourish, there must be new entrants to the market. Many new publications have sprung up in the digital soil of the information age, but too many of these have been co-opted by the existing info-colonialists, or crushed altogether. Publications that have been ostensibly left leaning have never really been FROM the left. They have been a vague conception by the bourgeoisie media elite of what they THINK a Left publication should be. It’s been well-meaning feelgood content for elites to talk about at cocktail parties.

On the anniversary of Black Wednesday, it is worthwhile to think about Africa charting a path away from the stranglehold of the liberal frameworks and conventions of “Media Freedom”. Hard coded into the post-apartheid, post-colonial definition of this, are the constraints of liberal funding, conditionalities, and western hegemonic worldviews. We must build our own new independent media at every scale – from grassroots community media, to building Pan-African networks that can stand beside organizations such as Reuters, AP, CNN, Bloomberg, and others. Only once we are truly free from interference by imperial actors can we say that we have media freedom.

Roscoe Palm is the co-founder of PAIS