Media+are+capitalist+triggers,+COSATU+GS+Zwelinzima+Vavi,+M+and+G

Mail and Guardian, Johannesburg, //20 October 2006 11:59//
=Media are capitalist triggers=


 * Zwelinzima Vavi**

One of my most frustrating experiences as general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has been trying to tell the public that Cosatu has not decided to back anyone to lead the African National Congress (ANC). No matter how many times or how publicly we set the record straight, the media keep saying we back a particular individual.

Similarly, every day the press repeats that Cosatu is split between the ANC president and his deputy. We can say over and over that this is an exaggerated and oversimplified myth. Regardless, the media keep repeating it.

To understand the gap between Cosatu's reality and the media myths, we have to locate the press in our social and political context.

In 1848, the Communist Manifesto declared that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", that oppressor and oppressed carry on "an interrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ends either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes".

That statement is as true today for South Africa as it was in Europe some 150 years ago. Capital and the working class engage in daily struggles to impose their hegemony on society. Each wants its ideas, culture and principles to prevail. Each wants its interests to be declared a national interest.

This class struggle plays out in our newsrooms as it does in every other area of society. Today, the overriding importance of media and information has made the pen -- or at least the computer -- perhaps the most powerful weapon of all.

The media are ultimately owned and controlled by the capitalist class. As a minimum, every newspaper and broadcaster, even the South African Broadcasting Corporation, looks to business advertising to survive. And business ensuring ruthlessly that, as the cliché says, there is no free lunch -- nothing is for //mahala//.

The capitalist class uses the media to impose its values and ideas on society. Every day, the media tell us that capitalism is the only realistic choice, that government must reduce services for the poor in order to cut taxes on the rich, that workers must be denied rights so that the economy can grow.

In contrast, the working-class formations have no media of their own. Worker leaders must struggle to ensure the press reports the views of the organisations they lead.

The recent Cosatu congress saw a strong demonstration of unity around core policy demands and political direction. As in any democracy, the elections process involved contestation between leaders without threatening the organisation's cohesion.

Nonetheless, in line with the project of portraying the working class in a negative light, the media reported huge divisions. They claimed that every shop steward voted only because of their views on Mbeki and Zuma.

All too often, the media ignore Cosatu's official positions, instead relying on anonymous sources who use the media to paint a distorted picture to justify their own ill discipline or charlatanry. At the Cosatu congress, as the media themselves saw, no union raised deep disagreements on policy or principle. Nonetheless, the media used secretive sources to create the illusion of conflict in order to sell more newspapers.

All of this feeds Cosatu's broader concern about the media's consistent bias on political and socio-economic issues. Reflecting the interests of their millionaire owners, the media groups invariably favour the pro-capitalist, free-market view of the world. They defend the current capitalist economic system as logical and good, and strive to ensure its survival. They claim "independence" and "objectivity", but in reality portray capitalism as normal and socialism and militant trade unionism as dangerous aberrations.

Having positioned their newspapers in this perspective, the media can never be objective in their reporting. Those critical of economic policies that entrench mass unemployment, poverty and inequalities are labelled dangerous populists. Those who defend Jacob Zuma are "unthinking" and "stupid". Yet many independent institutions agree that Zuma has been victimised.

In this vein, the media keep repeating the lie that Cosatu has entered the "ANC succession debate". They insist Cosatu wants Zuma to be the next president of the ANC. Repeatedly, the federation has stated that it supports Zuma only in his battle to clear his name from baseless charges levelled by his political opponents, for trumped-up corruption charges to be dropped and for him to be reinstated as the country's deputy president.

This truth upsets the media and those conspiring against Zuma. It is an essential part of their propaganda that he is in league with the dangerous, populist forces of Cosatu and the South African Communist Party and must be stopped.

South Africa desperately needs left-wing, working-class daily and weekend newspapers, TV and radio stations to answer all the lies before they are repeated so often that they eventually settle as the truth in the minds of the people.


 * From: http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=287247&area=/insight/insight__comment_and_analysis/**

834 words