Media gets a bad press
● There’s a terrifying monster slouching around out there. It has been spotted by some who write letters to this and other papers. It is allegedly an evil beast that spews untruths from its cankerous mouth. It is called “The Media”.
This creature, according to observers, is responsible for telling people to blindly do things that may harm them. It is accused, variously, of being in the pay of Big Pharma, the national government or sinister villains intent on world domination.
What the media actually is (or are) depends on who you ask. The first definition that pops up on Google is from the site Market Business News (MBN), which says: “The term media, which is the plural of medium, refers to communication channels … It includes physical and online newspapers and magazines, television, radio, telephone, the internet, fax and billboards.”
This must have been written in the early days of information technology because it includes “the internet”, but it betrays its ancient origins by also mentioning “fax”.
Remember the fax machine? I’d never considered this as a mouthpiece of the media but I suppose it might have spat out millions of slightly blurred pages of biased and misleading news. In the US they still use this device; there it is called a Fox machine.
MBN’s old-fashioned definition of media lumps together everyone who spouts any opinion on any device. There are actually hundreds of different types of media, but for simplicity’s sake let’s divide these into two: professional journalists versus those who share unchecked “facts” on unmonitored platforms. The first lot are generally known as “mainstream media”, a fairly acceptable term that has unfairly been turned into an insult.
How much people trust the mainstream media also depends on who you ask. In 2019, a survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism concluded that 53% of South Africans expressed trust in the media.
In 2020, the Edelman Trust Barometer reported only 40% support for the media, stating that, as in all facets of South African life, inequality affects perceptions. “The so-called ‘informed public’ — wealthier, more educated, and frequent consumers of news — are far more trusting … the mass population feel that the institutions are working against them.”
In 2021, 63% of respondents to an Afrobarometer survey in SA expressed trust in the media. Also this year, the Reuters Digital News Report said “most mainstream publications in SA have maintained more than 60% trust from the surveyed population”.
Then there is a five-year survey by Statista, the results of which were published in February. This concluded that “42% of respondents from SA stated that they trusted media as a source of reliable information, up from 40% in 2019”.
So much for numbers. All the stats seem to indicate, however, that South Africans don’t demonise The Media as much as seems anecdotally evident on social media (a very different and much more dangerous beast).
The thing is, there is no universal body called The Media. We don’t all phone each other and ask: “What untruths shall we tell today?” Journalists are as diverse as varieties of tinned food. What we have in common, however, is being bound by the Press Code of Ethics for South African Print and Online Media, which demands that “the media’s work is guided at all times by the public interest, understood to describe information of legitimate interest or importance to citizens”.
When mistakes are made or ethics are compromised, the outrage, inquiries, dismissals and mea culpas that follow prove that getting things wrong is not the norm. (For the purposes of this argument let’s not mention that contentious word “decuplets”.)
When journalists write that Covid-19 vaccines are safe, and that getting vaccinated will save lives, jobs and the world, they are reporting verified facts based on intensive and accurate research into sound medical science. They are not engaged in some massive conspiracy to hoodwink the public.
Incidentally, if there really were such a united thing as “The Media”, blaming it for everything that goes wrong would make a refreshing change from accusing that other fictional character, the red-skinned chap with horns and a forked tail. “I’m sorry, your honour, The Media made me do it.”