Christmas is the season of goodwill to all men but this year there is a list of South African men in positions of power for whom, after six days of no water at my home earlier this month, I have absolutely no goodwill towards − men such as President Cyril Ramaphosa, Premier Panyaza Lesufi and Johannesburg Mayor Dada Morero,
There is however one South African-born man in a very powerful position in the world, for whom I do, at present, have some goodwill and even admiration. That man is Elon Musk, who as I write is busy posting that he is “testing streaming on X via Starlink”.
My goodwill towards Musk may surprise many among you.
Musk after all has a profligate brood of a dozen children born to several mothers and, although he is often pictured with one or other child by his side, this fact about him does justifiably raise questions about his ideas of parental responsibility and moral compass.
He is also, currently, “best buddies” with the President-elect of the US, Donald Trump, a man many see as unbelievably bad news for their country. People on what I call the “shrieking-inclined left”, where irrationality and emotion rule, virulently detest Musk and the X platform he bought two years ago for the role they played in getting Trump elected.
In defence of Musk I could point out, facetiously, that he has a stylish, charming mom, with a still strong South African accent who I rather like, and who is something of a role model for women of a certain age.
But the real reason for my goodwill is that I believe Musk is engaged in exciting things that could benefit all of us in the future. My liberal leanings make me favourable towards people and developments that promise progress. I tend to default towards disrupters and people who risk innovating.
Musk is aiming to take mankind to Mars and has succeeded in both launching rockets and, to my wondrous amazement, successfully catching one of them on re-entry for future reuse. He is building a frighteningly capable robot called Optimus and is making great strides, apparently, with the Neuralink brain chip, a computer interface that could help people overcome severe brain disorders.
Anything but
His Tesla company is developing self-driving electric vehicles and he has even shaken up the tunnel-making industry with The Boring Company, which is anything but, having constructed, apparently both time- and cost-effectively, the clever Vegas Loop.
Musk is also set to play a special advisor role in what Trump intends will be a digitised-savvy department that makes government more efficient.
(Do we not all dream of a government that is an efficient enabler rather than a regulation- and process-burdened behemoth? I too would have a thousand ideas to put across in this regard if given the opportunity.)
But it is the new media frontier that Musk has helped create that I am most interested in and eager to see what happens next.
It is encouraging that someone like Musk, with an influential and powerful social media platform serving approximately 588 million monthly active users who post sometimes up to 500 million posts a day, frequently and loudly advocates for freedom of speech and communicates directly with users on his platform.
(Unless of course, he has handed his profile over to a minion to manage while he is off making babies.)
Musk is undoubtedly a monstrously powerful media magnate who will need close tracking to determine if his talk accords with his actions.
Currently, it is my experience, which is my experience only, that X is more open and diverse than any other media I engage with, and is one of the reasons I’m still on it and haven’t disappeared to former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey’s alternative social media platform, Blue Sky. Musk super confidently agrees with an eager fan that the most important people are all on X.
Musk’s SpaceX offshoot, the Starlink satellite constellation internet provider, is also a highly significant element in his media god toolbox and could be instrumental in making X what he calls the chat group of the world.
It is a particularly sought after because of its ability to easily connect remote or hard-to-reach rural areas.
“We are the media now”
As someone who has spent more than four decades in journalism and media, I’m keeping my attention focused on what unfolds in response to Musk’s cock-of-the-hoop post-election statement on X: “We are the media now.”
I am hoping the “old left media” will respond, not with apoplectic defences of what they’ve been doing these past couple of decades, but a radical rethinking of what role media and journalism need to play in this new digital social-media-as-a-significant-influencer-and-source age.
(In his 2011 compilation, 365 ways to drive a Liberal Crazy, James Delingpole advises anyone wishing to do such a thing should ditch the expression mainstream media in favour of “old left media”. But I will simply add it to all the references we currently deploy to describe the journalism and media that has been around for centuries and decades: Legacy media, traditional journalism, corporate media, and yes, in this case, quite accurately “old left media”.)
Musk’s provocative statement is not something I quibble with.
Social media in all its forms has made everyone with access to a social media platform a journalist, or, at the very least, a content creator or “opinionista”, who, with their own media ecosystem at their disposal, is able to generate content, present it and distribute it to the public.
It has greater reach than most of mainstream media.
Wars and revolts, both physical and cultural, have in recent years started and been conducted via social media more than gatekeeping old media.
Any “old left media” disparaging the role of podcaster, YouTuber, or content producer should instantly realise they are not doing themselves any favours in the current situation.
Traditional journalists knew citizen journalism would come about eventually once Twitter took off in 2007. Initially they welcomed the idea. Legacy media, though, perhaps too preoccupied at first with how it was going to find a replacement for dwindling advert income and expand its ability to reach an audience using digital, and, currently, work out how to use AI to its advantage, failed to pay attention to the effect a news information, debate and distribution tool in the hands of ordinary citizens would have on “professional” news journalism practice and its battle to find new revenue streams.
Power to “move the needle”
The US election result showed that social media is “consequential” – it has the power to “move the needle” in politics.
That has shocked legacy media which for the past decade or more has, in the US, been square in the Democrat camp and relentlessly destroying any integrity it once had.
Increasingly it regarded the power to bring about political change as its exclusive prerogative, and its principal role to be the “bulwark of democracy”.
This concept has now been rendered even more outdated than the antique elitist concept of the Fourth Estate as equal in political power to the other estates of the clergy, the nobility and commoners.
Other roles traditional journalism has conceived of for itself in the past, such as the creators of “the first rough draft of history” or “giving voice to the voiceless”, also seem relics of a pre-citizen journalism era.
I had an indication of the democracy-damaging one-note direction US media was heading back in 2003 when I was on a Poynter Institute leadership course with scores of senior US journalists in St Petersburg, Florida. Toward the end of the course, we combined for a session on ethics, diversity and future change during which we completed tasks that illustrated the advantages and disadvantages of a diversity of personalities on an editorial floor.
The course director, Jill Geisler, then asked an unexpected question of the participants: Which of you have a Republican in your newsroom?
No one in the room appeared to know if they did have such a being, and no one declared themselves to be one, although they were drawn from a wide collection of newspapers and broadcasters from across the States.
I realised then that that same monoculture was what was increasingly happening in South African newsrooms through the silencing of classical liberal voices, the Democratic Alliance, and other opponents of the African National Congress.
Diversity
Diversity of personalities. Tick. In South Africa increasing diversity of race. Tick. Diversity of political beliefs and opinions? Not so much.
Despite their DEI hires over the past years US legacy newsrooms did not much change the status quo.
But a brave few, however, like Bari Weiss, the founder of The Free Press, on Substack, fought back.
In July 2020, her letter of resignation from her post as writer and editor of New York Times Opinion summed up what was going wrong with journalism on the NYT (and several other esteemed papers and journals in the States):
“I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers.”
Her resignation letter said that although she succeeded in some degree in bringing other voices into the paper “…the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”
Weiss sums up my feelings exactly.
In my experience truth is something news journalists may or may not arrive at after finding out information, interrogating the facts of and in it, and presenting their findings fairly to citizens in the most appropriate and accessible format so that they can make their own decision.
Predictability
What Weiss said applies also to the media in South Africa. Here, the predictability of the media’s treatment of news events and politics and of opinions and to a certain extent an arrogant attitude, have been a result of our history. The people who have most often made it to the top in our mainstream media in the past several decades have been people who long ago hitched their wagon to activism in favour of the liberation struggle, and social justice with small caps that has morphed into Social Justice. They tend to believe their users or audiences should be herded into their corral.
They have not been quite able to throw off their historical allegiances, to free their and their newsrooms thought processes even as large chunks of the population turn away from their news journalism offerings.
Our pathetic education system and the push to take on board people who would alter the racial make-up of newsrooms led to many in media prioritising the recruitment of young journalists with university degrees. Which means many incomers had already internalised the leftist narrative dominating most universities, a narrative which is quickly entrenched by the prevailing orthodoxy in our newsrooms.
The Federalist.com, talking about media critic Michael Walsh’s new book Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You, describes it as tracking journalism’s devolution from “a ‘blue-collar’ trade to a ‘consensus’ profession of ‘bubble’ elitists ‘who have abandoned editorial ethics, even the First Amendment, for the ‘higher duty’ of promoting and protecting the leftist agenda.”
The “unexpected” Trump win at the polls, the decline in the public’s trust in media as shown by survey after survey from the Reuters Institute, the public’s declining reliance on corporate news providers, the increasing vociferousness of middle class, ordinary people, who are now able to communicate directly with their political leaders via social media, should all combine now to force legacy media and traditional journalists to “catch a wake-up” .
Today, “old left media” and journalism must not only improve fact checking and damp down its tendency to list to the left on any narrative in order to restore citizens’ trust and their desire for news. It must also rethink, radically, what journalism’s role should be and how it should be carried out from now on.
Listen and engage
The challenge is how to do journalism without being arrogant, elitist, partisan or an activist; how best to listen and engage more with ordinary people in their physical communities or wherever they are active online: how to get in touch with all those normies, for instance, who were willing to pay to see Top Gun: Maverick and push it into a record global box office earner but who balk at subscribing to legacy news sources.
The Wits Centre of Journalism’s Dr Dinesh Balliah, in her preface to the WCJ project report on Saving Journalism in South Africa and How Newsrooms coped with the Elections, appears on the right track when she says:
“If we are to recognise journalism as a public good, we must recognise that journalism does not belong to journalists, it belongs to the publics it serves. What is medicine after all, without the patient? Journalism produced in communities must reflect the community in which it operates; it must speak to communities in their languages and with their images in sharp focus. The community must set the agenda, and we need to engage in new ways of listening to know what is needed. These are not off-the-cuff ideas offered in the quest to save journalism. Local and international research tells us this consistently; but we seem to be fixated with entrenching what is not working rather than building something new.”
I’m hoping that this something new will be truly, excitingly innovative; that corporate media and traditional journalists will emulate Musk in being ambitious and aiming high; that quality formal journalism done for the public good will be fair and factual, sustained directly by the communities it serves, or once again advertisers lured by its popularity and quality, rather than donors or governments.
Only in that way can we kill off that nasty meme that enters my thoughts all too often these days when reading news stories. “You don’t hate the media enough.”
This meme is only kept at bay when I read news produced by investigative journalists or a team that deploys expertise, skill and ethics all along the production line to its final valuable offer to the public.
Considered and expert
We need professional journalism that is considered and expert, devoid of propaganda and relevant to our lives. Journalism that is not simply out to notch up likes or engagement or influence with the least possible effort and expenditure.
And we need plenty of citizen journalism from every corner of our country feeding into all our conversations. All this journalism will need to be the wily watchdog on our new media and technology moguls, whoever they may be, however altruistic their stated aims.
Which brings me back to Musk’s Starlink, which can connect all our people to one another and the world of ideas, debate, information and education. We need it now rather than much later.
Already three of South Africa’s neighbours and Eswatini have access to Starlink connectivity, as have 11 other African countries.
But it appears we may not be left out when it comes to bringing digital connectivity to all the country’s citizens.
In October communications minister Solly Malatsi said he would seek alterations to policy that could overcome BEE provisions in the communications legislation that may have put Musk off asking for a licence for Starlink to operate in South Africa.
The BEE provisions currently require applicants for a communication licence to have 30% ownership by historically disadvantaged people.
News24 reported in mid-December that the changes in policy direction − which would enable ICASA to consider the inclusion of equity equivalence investment programmes as a licence condition rather than 30% ownership − were expected to be completed in the middle of 2025.
Hopefully Musk will take up this particular opportunity to spread his net even wider and take yet more people with him into this future digital and information age.
I can see several advantages for us as a country in such a development.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/163370954@N08/46339127625]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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