Mazibuko Jara addresses the Community Media Reflection Conference on 8 October 2009. He presents the current political situation and outlines the challenges facing community media in South Africa.

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READ THE FULL CONFERENCE REPORT HERE

Mazibuko Jara of AIDC started with his presentation on the global/national socio-political context with an concept introduced by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century – that the dominant ideas in any society are the ideas that represent the interests of the ruling class and quoted from the Trade Union Library in Cape Town where there is a sign that says “information is too important to leave to bosses”.

 

He raised the critical question of the role of media and information in the context of the global crisis sketched out earlier and how there was a need to think about how to systematically and progressively locate the role of the community media sector. He cautioned that though the South African state is a democratic state;   there are worrying factors that community media activists need to think about; especially the strong streak of authoritarian populism that is prevalent. While it is   populist in the sense and form of representing popular interests, at the same time, there is a hidden anti-democratic perspective.

 

Using the recent events in Kennedy Road, he raised important questions of who is getting blamed for crime and how populism is opening the door for vigilantism as well as the challenge that community media faces about how to cover such stories which may or may implicate the state – without threatening the state.

 

Given the sparse numbers of reformers in the state and the dearth of people who are challenging the neo-liberal direction the country is taking; he saw community media as having the space to be the voice for communities in dire conditions but recognised the difficulties of doing if the sector is beholden to the state.

 

Some of the other critical questions he raised in his presentation include what the values of our society are? What the progressive values that define our society are? And he asked the question of where community media be when there is an erosion of progressive rights and values. Despite the country’s liberal Constitution and radical working class gains and struggles, South Africa is a socially conservative society and  has an essentially socially conservative dominant media

 

Linked to the above is the more complicated issue of how to tell a story. The Community Health Media Trust is an example of an organisation that has grappled for years with messages to convey and communicate about HIV/AIDS that is not scare-mongering but rather reinforces social mobilisation. A big problem is the powerful language of neo-liberalist ideology that influences what the media says and how it says it.

 

Community media has very limited resources to undertake research so a key challenge is how to construct a story. And the challenge posed by this moment is how do you break consensus to manufacture consent?

 

An important notion or concept he introduced was seeing the media as a public good. Community media needs a long term perspective of how it constructs itself. If community media and information is seen as a public good; the question becomes what role it plays to inform; to provide access to information and to produce news and information? . Citizen journalism is a wonderful idea that theoretically exists – how can it be used to assert the right to information as a public good.

 

In looking at the conditions that will enable a thriving progressive; democratic, community owned and controlled media sector, he pointed out that a key condition was that of the availability of public funding that is not controlled in a crude way by the government and that this would require debate as it is questionable whether the state would provide public funding for struggles against the state?

 

He highlighted the important of public funding but warned that it should not be crudely managed and raised a challenge for the MDDA to focus on its attention on its mandate to challenge the power and structure of the mainstream media and not just on its funding role. He also pointed out that the MDDA’s resources were too limited to sustain community media. challenge the power and structure of mainstream media. This is the first step towards more activism in the sector.

 

Mazibuko ended his presentation with the view that the future for community media was to be different to mainstream media as well as the need to develop community media that supports dissent and that generates ideas that can change society.