Writes Cetshwayo Mabhena Politics of the Media in Africa
In his wisdom, Zambian former President Kenneth Kaunda referred to the media as “an invisible” and in a strong way “powerful” and yet “unelected government” that has immense control of the hearts and minds of national populations
MORE than the school, the church and the family unit as sites of ideological formation of the human being, the media have become a central site of the formation of modern men and women in the present world. A British Irish statesman, and philosopher Edmund Burke in 1787 described the media as the “Fourth Estate” of the Kingdom after the Spiritual Lords, the Temporal Lords and the Commons in Parliament.
In our times, as the “Fourth Estate” the media become the fourth arm of power after the Judiciary, the Legislature and the Executive arms of state authority. In his wisdom, Zambian former President Kenneth Kaunda referred to the media as “an invisible” and in a strong way “powerful” and yet “unelected government” that has immense control of the hearts and minds of national populations. The media set the agenda of daily conversations. In pubs, schools, churches, families and other gatherings people as citizens and subjects spend hours discussing and thinking about what the media have published and disseminated per given day. The media decide what does and what does not occupy the public imagination each day.
As gate keepers, the media have an immense capacity to prevent certain topics and subjects from entering the public sphere and discourse, as much as they can allow other topics and subjects to become subjects of popular deliberation. By elevating other subjects and suppressing others, the media shape public opinion, construct mindsets and manufacture reality itself. The little shapes of print on paper, the sounds that are broadcast in the air and visuals that are circulated for sight decide our sense of the universe around us. We are in several ways living in and experiencing a mediacentric world whose reality has been concretised by rapid technologisation and the imperial expanse of the social media. The World Wide Web has made stupid of time and distance by collapsing and compressing the world into a very small place. With the power that the media have, whether they are public or private, it becomes important to understand what and who in actuality the media are in the world. In Africa and the entire Global South, spaces that have been hard done by the hegemonic Euro-American World Order, it is important to examine how the media have enabled or disabled access to power, knowledge and fuller humanity.
Who the Media say they are Wherever they are found in the world, in whatever shape and form they appear, the media pride themselves with their normative role of education, information and entertainment. Further, whether publicly owned or privately operated, the media boast of themselves as a democratic good and an enabler of critical debate with an essential watchdog role that keeps powerful political and business elites on their toes. Without the media, pundits and activists argue, democracy and development would be a remote possibility and even an impossible ask.
There is no doubt that indeed the media have an educational capacity. The doubt that is there or that must be there is over whose and what type of education each media entity disseminates since education itself is not a neutral object but a contested and contestable phenomenon whose agenda may not be taken for granted. The informational role of the media can also not be refuted, what can be questioned is the quality of the information, the agenda of its contents, and timing of its revelation and dissemination. What is entertaining to one audience may be punishment to another, and the global entertainment industry has prominently contributed to the Americanisation of the world and Eurocentric cultural imperialism. What we consider entertainment in music, movies and sport are also highly ideological and powerfully manipulative artefacts that shape the world in the image and after the imagination of Empire. The cultural and information goods that we consume in the media are not value free but are loaded with sentiments, sensibilities and even sensualities of the hegemonic World Order.
If they say it at all, it is without emphasis, that the media are also a big business. Besides education, information and entertainment the media sell. Through advertising, marketing and public relations the media sell goods and services, ideas, images, organisations, political parties and even personalities. The media package and distribute impressions and sentiments. They make and unmake celebrities, distribute fame and popularity. In words, sounds and signs the media construct and disseminate reality. In 1922, Walter Lippmann described it as “the manufacture of consent,” the ability of the media to pass falsehood for truth and achieve public acceptance of otherwise inimical agendas. In 1992, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman amplified the idea of “manufacturing consent” as the uses of the mass media by political and business elite in society to erect their interests and install their agendas as the truth and the commonsense of the times.
As business, the media do not simply exist in the climate of the market forces under the laws of supply and demand but they also use their power to shape and angle the market forces. The media, in many ways, are a business that shapes and controls other businesses that create atmospheres that other businesses have to navigate. What we simplistically see with our eyes daily is that we buy media products by purchasing newspapers, magazines and subscribing to radio and television channels. In actuality the media sell us daily to advertisers, marketers and other promoters. The bigger the circulation, the audience and the coverage the media can claim and prove, the more expensive their advertising space becomes, and the more profit they make. Even the venerated democratic and developmental role that the media, public or private, claim cannot be taken for granted. The media cannot be democratic and developmental simply by being the media in themselves for themselves; they have to prove their democratic and developmental role in practice, otherwise. Decolonising the media
in Africa Globally, the media have conspired with Empire in purveying cultural imperialism and misrepresenting histories and cultures of the peoples of the Global South in what has been called cultural imperialism. In Africa, privately owned and publicly owned media have severally aligned themselves to big political powers and big business interests to the alienation of communities of ordinary people. The media slogans and catch phrases of education, information and entertainment in a big way conceal rather than reveal the complete truth concerning the role of the media in societies. Besides selling agendas, interests of the powerful, the media also manufacture desires, create taste and interests that culminate in massive demand for certain goods and services, creating massive consumption that enriches others by impoverishing others. The media make fashion and trends. Largely, the media have powerful owners, powerful controllers, powerful financiers and powerful interests that stamp their signature on media content. Powerless people appear in the media as raw materials, the poor witnesses and victims of disasters and crimes; or when they have done strange and bizarre things, like raping donkeys, otherwise the media are for the powerful politically and economically. The media society; that is media workers such as journalists and editors are trained information experts and professionals whose training has its own ideological baggage. They report, select and deselect information from specific loci of enunciation. For that reason, critically speaking, public interest may not be the first item on the agenda of the media. Before a story, in text and in visual, sees the light of day, it passes through a long value chain of selection, cutting, removal, editing and subediting. It is for that reason that most media items for public consumption are more interesting to the public than they are of public interest. What publics consume daily, in form of media products, are almost always a smaller part of the bigger story. In Africa, the agenda for decolonising the media, public and private, should include ensuring that the media invest interest and priority in the experiences, knowledge and interests of the poor and peripherised populations. Policies and laws should be enacted that ensure that the profit and political motive do not always monopolise media attention. Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic based in S ou t h Africa.