S. Africa’s Whites, Blacks and the News

It was a typical news day at the studios of the South African Broadcasting Corp., the state-owned media giant that dominates the airwaves here. Story after story was bad news.

There were angry teachers without jobs, the inauguration of a provincial premier who has been accused of fraud and an investigation into the massacre of 18 people. To top it off, a leading campaigner against child abuse was accused of raping a young girl.

“I would like to break up this catalog of misery,” Allister Sparks, the head of news, told a meeting of editors planning the evening program.

Sparks flipped through 10 pages of story offerings. His gaze settled on Item No. 9: an interview with the education minister about new funding for schools. “I want to see that interview. It may be the way to give this a little lightening,” he said.

Sparks, 64, a stalwart of South African print journalism, is a newcomer to television, but he is already making a provocative statement with his approach to broadcasting: News needs to reflect more than the ubiquitous pain of transformation. Journalists, he says, have an obligation to look beyond the shortcomings of the new South Africa and vigorously pursue its achievements as well.

The Sparks approach sounds like the good news versus bad news quandary debated in U.S. newsrooms. In fact, it is much more. It strikes at the heart of a fundamental disagreement in this newly democratic country about the role that white-dominated media should play in nurturing the new political order led by President Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, or ANC, a movement mostly of blacks.

Many white journalists say they are professionals who should be left alone to do their jobs as they see fit, regardless of the color of the government and the fallout from their coverage. Critics, most of them black, say too much is at stake: These are new and extraordinary times that demand new and extraordinary journalism, even if it sometimes smacks of old-fashioned patriotism to suspicious whites.

“Far too many media are white-controlled, and they are articulating a white viewpoint of what is happening in this country,” said Mike Siluma, the black editor of the Sowetan, the only black-owned daily newspaper in Johannesburg, the country’s biggest city. “It is unacceptable. You cannot talk about democracy when the majority of people are silenced.”

In remarks over the past year, Mandela has come down hard on a mass media that he views as hostile to the country’s 4-year-old transition from the apartheid system of racial separation to black majority rule. At the recent ANC convention, he likened journalists to the National Party--the white-minority rulers of the past and dogged opponents of change.

“The media uses the democratic order, brought about by the enormous sacrifices of our own people, as an instrument to protect the legacy of racism, graphically described by its own patterns of ownership, editorial control, value system and advertiser influence,” Mandela said. “At the same time, and in many respects, it has shown a stubborn refusal to discharge its responsibility to inform the public.”

At a meeting with top newspaper editors, most of whom are white, Mandela was equally blunt.

“Whatever measures have been taken,” he said, “the truth is that the media is still in the control of whites, and in many cases conservative whites, who are unable to reflect the aspirations of the majority.”

The issue of white ownership is beyond dispute. Blacks have been appointed to high-profile jobs by several publishing companies, but most corporate offices and everyday news operations remain in the hands of whites, who make up just 13% of the population. Few black entrepreneurs have been able to pull together the kind of capital needed to compete with white-owned media, and advertisers are still most interested in reaching the largely white middle class.

Sowetan editor Siluma left the Johannesburg Star, the country’s biggest newspaper and a favorite target of black critics, after his aspirations to attain a role in higher management were rebuffed. Those blacks who have succeeded in white organizations, Mandela and others argue, typically adopt the values and viewpoints of their white counterparts--in a sense becoming as much a problem as whites.

“You don’t get specific instructions that thou shall or shall not write something, but the body language of your superiors tells you,” said veteran journalist Thami Mazwai, managing director of Mafube, the country’s only black-owned magazine publisher. “You write a story that praises Winnie Mandela [the president’s former wife and the darling of ANC radicals] and it gets buried inside. You write one that denigrates Winnie Mandela and it becomes the cover story. It is something you pick up if you are a journalist keyed on promotion.”

Complaints About Color Rejected

Most white journalists--and some black colleagues--bristle at such suggestions.

Sam Sole, president of the South African Union of Journalists, the country’s largest association of journalists, said none of its black members has come forward with a specific complaint about pressures--direct or indirect--from white editors. Sole said the union agrees that media companies need to better reflect the country’s racial makeup, but he rejected the assumption that whites are incapable of providing evenhanded coverage in black-dominated South Africa.

“That a particular color of journalist still makes up a majority in a particular newsroom is not in itself evidence of a conspiracy or poor journalism,” said Sole, who is white. “The media is one of the pillars of civil society, but central to the fulfillment of that role is independence. The siren call for journalists--to in a sense censor themselves for the sake of the national interest--is a very dangerous one.”

Sparks of the South African Broadcasting Corp., or SABC, said the issue is not one of censorship but rather of recognizing and reporting a mix of news--both positive and negative. Sparks, who is white, says journalists have by and large lost sight of “one of history’s most dramatic transformations anywhere” and chosen to settle into the simpler role of armchair critics.

Instead of writing about the massive--and mostly peaceful--integration of public schools, for example, most media have concentrated on spotty resistance to the changes, he said; instead of reporting about the hundreds of thousands of new houses built since the 1994 elections, journalists typically have focused on troubles in the housing department, dismissing it as a failure.

Many of Sparks’ counterparts defend their coverage as a necessary outcome of the media’s role as a public check on government, which they liken to being a watchdog, not a lap dog. The weekly Mail & Guardian, one of the country’s most aggressive publications in exposing government corruption, has taken so much heat for its reporting that it recently published an editorial proclaiming, “We are not the enemy.”

“The ANC is not a ‘black’ government, it is ‘our’ government,” the editorial said. “It represents all of us. That is why we are so jealous of its performance.”

Sparks said he prefers the image of journalists as a mirror--with news reports reflecting the entirety of a vast and changing landscape. Stories of corruption, yes, but context too.

“Reading the newspapers here reminds me of a movie trailer, where you get all of the explosions, all of the guns going off, all of the car chases . . . but it doesn’t tell you anything really what the movie is going to be about,” he said.

Sparks’ office in the towering SABC complex just north of downtown Johannesburg has a large window that overlooks the main newsroom. As the afternoon deadline approaches, the desks fill with journalists of all colors. At the 3:30 p.m. news meeting, there are men and women, blacks and whites and people of mixed race among the dozen or so editors.

Sparks likes to boast about his rainbow staff, but he concedes it is a rare sight; most news organizations in South Africa have had little success in loosening the white hold on their ranks. Many don’t try very hard, and those that do are confronted with a shortage of qualified blacks. The journalists’ union estimates that 70% of South African journalists are white.

And the competition for candidates is intense. SABC’s chief executive, for example, is Zwelakhe Sisulu, a black journalist who went directly from editing a small weekly newspaper with a reporting staff of eight to the top job at a company with 3,500 employees and three nationwide channels.

“We wanted to appoint a black journalist as an assistant editor, but we cannot afford him now,” Johan de Wet, editor of the Afrikaans-language newspaper Beeld, complained to Mandela, according to a transcript of their meeting printed in the Rhodes University Journalism Review. “It would be of great benefit to have black journalists, but it is very difficult to find them.”

Journalists Mirror a Larger Problem

The shortage of black journalists reflects a broader employment problem in post-apartheid South Africa: Blacks were given limited educational opportunities under the white-minority regime, so very few were prepared to move into white-dominated professions after the first free elections, in April 1994. And as Mandela told De Wet, many blacks still view the media with great suspicion because of the role some reporters and editors played in perpetuating apartheid.

“There are not many qualified black journalists because the industry has not made the profession attractive to blacks,” said Mazwai, the magazine publisher. “At the end of the day, when a black guy walks into [a newsroom], he finds out that it is not the land of milk and honey that he thought it would be, because of all the whites. These young blacks are much more aggressive today, and they come in, look around and say: ‘No, no, no. I can’t stand it.’ ”

Several efforts have been made to improve the pool of black journalists, most notably through the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand. Founded by Sparks in 1992, the school offers courses to about 750 practicing journalists a year from across southern Africa.

“The problem is that newsrooms here are filled with black people with a very limited world view,” said T. William Bango, a Zimbabwean journalist who heads the institute’s print media division. “We end up explaining things like basic geography to them, and the difference between active and passive voice. And these are working journalists.”

Siluma, the Sowetan editor--who heads the South African National Editors’ Forum--said too little money is being spent on education before would-be journalists walk into their first newsrooms. Black publications such as the Sowetan simply don’t have the resources, he said, and the industry as a whole continues to drag its feet.

Ironically, Siluma says, government funding may be the only answer.

“I know there are people who disagree very strongly, [who think] that if government gives you money, then they will control you,” he said. “The Sowetan doesn’t see government as evil as a given. It is not our duty to oppose government; that is the job of the opposition parties.”

Sole, the union chief, predicted that commercial imperatives will ultimately dictate a massive overhaul of the South African media, as with the rest of the economy. The bottom line, he said, is that the growing market in South Africa is black; to survive, the media will have to become blacker too.

Only then, say critics of the status quo, will the new South Africa be secured.

“It is our duty to make sure the new order takes root, that we have a new democratic society deeply ingrained in people’s minds,” Mazwai said. “Unfortunately, the white media are resisting that function--they see things mostly from their white European perspective, not for the good it will do this African country.”