Flawed headline speaks to Zeitgeist

CONSIDER this headline: “Moody’s says it has noticed financial underperformance and weak governance in SA.” It was written for a Business Day story about the ratings agency’s most recent credit opinion, informed by what it called a lack of progress in implementing reforms at stateowned enterprises.

Although mostly true, in a number of ways the headline is flawed. First — and this is the key to its flaw — the verb “noticed” is oblique to its usage in the story. But there it is, saying that certain facts about the South African economy have come to light as though they happened in some passively generated way and which, as a matter of say, duty, Moody’s is mentioning them now.

Read the story here: http://www.bdlive.co.za/ economy/2016/09/15/moodys-says-it-hasnoticed-financial-underperformance-and-weakgovernance-in-sa

Further, the terms “financial underperformance” and “weak governance”, in the context of almost any official act of governing by the ANC government, are understated to a point of absurdity. In a sense, it is fair to suspect that the headline came about as a partisan formulation in unconscious empathy of the agency’s obligation to remain dispassionate in its assessments. But in that, too, it is flawed, failing even as an act of ideological subversion having been inserted quietly into SA’s leading financial publication in the service of the money lending capitalist international.

Yet, it is a great headline. It unassumingly, perhaps unwittingly, writes history. It is a truth beyond its mandate to attract attention. It is neither entirely accurate, nor in the least sensationalist. In the context of the story, it is not an act with a purpose other than itself. Perhaps it is pure art from the fevered pan of a sub-editor under deadline pressure, but what the person who wrote it has achieved is to capture the Zeitgeist in a moment in the history of an emasculated nation observing the escalation of its decrepitude as it is frog-marched towards the abyss, as though in a drill in preparation for the live event.

The headline is an act of witness. In that sense it is great journalism. By isolating the headline from the story we read more into Moody’s announcement than the sum of the words of the statement. The announcement (that the continued guarantees to unprofitable state-owned enterprises point to avoidance of difficult structural reforms) may call for a more facile headline, but it would have had to ignore the story’s wider context. Instead it witnesses, and it calls to witness everyone who reads it, the fact that the ratings agencies, investors, citizens and everyone else knows what has happened in SA. History has indiscriminately captured this record.

We witness the wider context in a public utterance by President Jacob Zuma in which he urges all South Africans to refrain from public utterances that promote a negative narrative about the country, as reported in Business Day. This, Zuma believes, could cause a downgrade and jeopardise jobs and growth.

What he means is if South Africans don’t say the country is in trouble even if it is, it isn’t. By that reasoning, if and when ratings agencies downgrade SA’s debt to junk status, it would be so only because people have uttered it to be so.

Zuma might have had a point if he was referring to undisciplined and sensationalist reporting about the state of the nation, but few reports about SA’s financial crisis have been more constrained than that which reported what Moody’s noticed. This bit of journalism illuminates the fact that SA is likely to survive the global economic conditions and whatever the weather throws at it, but that it’s at greatest risk from its government. And there is not an iota of negativity in it.

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Blom is a fly-fisherman who likes to write.