The decline of the news media, of print journalism, in particular, has been cause for concern for the better part of the past 100 years or more. That may be only a slight exaggeration.
Paper shortages in the 1920s threatened the print media, at about the same time that newspapers began to be more seriously seduced by sensationalism. This was an era in the US when the news media increased print runs and circulation (increasing profits) by focusing on celebrities, sport, entertainment, scandal, gossip and crime.
More recently, broadcast media has been struggling to keep up with social media platforms such as TikTok. One very recent development (and it’s much more pervasive in South Africa) is pernicious and intellectually lazy ad hominem journalism.
The cynosure of this trend is the general attacks on female journalists, and most recently on Karyn Maughan, in particular. The comments section of online media can be especially nasty, personal and seriously lacking in an understanding of what journalism is; the difference between news reportage, commentary and analysis.
I have previously defended “trolls”, mainly because they add to the news, to public discussions, and can keep news media on its toes. But reading online comments can be seriously damaging to your health.
When individual journalists attack other journalists, based quite often on bad information and focusing especially on women, journalism can become a hellscape.
Journalists disagree among themselves. Very many disagreements are ideological, cultural or ethnic – in the broadest sense of these terms – but the key is to always counter arguments or express differing positions with stronger argument and evidence, and at least stand by your own ideological or “cultural” preferences.
Every journalist has biases and preferences and all newspapers have “positions”, areas of focus and reportage; they do, after all, serve readers.
For example, The Economist (for which I have a gift subscription and read weekly against my better judgement) is quite possibly the most ideological news journal in the world. Its stance is always in support of classical liberalism, free markets, unshackled capitalism and conservative politics.
At the time I first began reading The Economist, as part of my daily reading at the London School of Economics in 1993, and again at the World Bank a few years later, the magazine was found to be drifting towards an American model which made it, in the words of Don Guttenplan, “less than accurate or balanced in its assessments of important issues [with a distinct] relationship between the editorial staff and UK government economists and the World Bank. The Economist has also been found to favour whites over other races in its articles.” (Research paper by Don Guttenplan, The Americanisation of The Economist, published by the Columbia Journalism Review in 1993, not available online).
Agendas
The news media sets agendas. The National Bureau Of Economic Research in the US published an excellent research paper on this news-setting, focusing especially on news media in that country.
I’m not sure that the South African media plays a significant political role today. I know, for sure, that during the 1980s we (on Sowetan, The Weekly Mail and the New Nation) were specifically anti-apartheid newspapers. We took a position.
That position probably accounted for the low readership of The Weekly Mail among white readers. The New Nation had distributional difficulties. Sowetan, which was distributed by the old Argus Company, was almost compulsory reading in the black community, which gave us up to 1.6 million readers a day. Less than 10% of other races read Sowetan.
In short, newspapers and journalists take positions and have biases.
I sometimes try to “take on” what I think is pernicious reportage (like the much beloved contribution to the global/Western demonisation of Iran which, I would argue, is part of laying the groundwork for a probable/likely US-inspired war against that country), and other times throw-down lines about individual journalists who have embassies on speed dial – especially when there is something bad to be said about Russia, Iran or China…
Anyone who has taken notice of how the US led the destruction of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya, carpet-bombed Laos and dropped Agent Orange on Vietnamese villagers, should tremble at the way Washington seems to be salivating at the prospect of flattening the beauty of Isfahan – because, you know, that architectural and urban genius predates the US by at least 2,000 years. It is “premodern” and not part of “European civilisation”.
Out of order
It is bang out of order to attack individual journalists in the manner that Karyn Maughan has been demonised and vilified by IOL and its parent, Independent Media. Such attacks on women/female journalists have the effect of maintaining gendered power structures. The things women say and do, as compared with men’s writings and habits, are diminished and thereby make men’s voices more authoritative, and devalue women’s work.
That’s beside the fact that the attacks on Maughan’s work have been less than credible, and in defence of the most egregious project of reducing the standard of journalism across a family of newspapers.
For instance, graphic depictions of Maughan have been framed with Nazi symbols, thereby further demonising an outstanding journalist. These attacks have been consistent, at least, with the self-dramatisation, apostasy and veritable saviour complex of newspaper owners who have tied their camel to a caravanserai drifting farther from the truth when, in fact, the job of journalists – and of social scientists, for that matter – is to get as close to the truth as possible.
One especially nasty trend, one which is tied to an otherwise solid ideological belief (I am not anti-ideology) but terribly abused and misguided, is assuming that the writers in the Daily Maverick stable are all travellers of the right.
Allow me a brief diversion. I don’t know the editor personally, and have communicated with one or two regular contributors only on rare occasions. I cannot, therefore, speak on behalf of the team.
Sure, one or two of my columns have been spiked, but that may be accounted for by anything – including my own shortcomings or misguided rants… Sure, I moan and cry foul to my wife about censorship and frustration when we go to bed at night (I am not married and sleep alone), but…
I write mainly about ideas (my ideal job would be as ideas editor of a newspaper, but I am long past any such possibility), but sophisticated and intertextual reading should reveal the Critical tradition, Gramscian thought and Transnational Class Analyses of Historical Capitalism in my work.
That I don’t spend every waking hour hating on Cyril Ramaphosa, Jacob Zuma, Lesetja Kganyago, the South African Reserve Bank, the CIA or MI6, the Kremlin or the Chinese Communist Party, or the two or three people I dislike intensely (Stanley Fischer, Lawrence Summer and Alan Greenspan) simply means that there is a lot more wrong with the world than our petty hates.
Anyway, one can only write about any of the aforementioned once or twice, and then turn the focus elsewhere. The trolls and commentators have the privilege of saying, “Yeah, but what about ‘the Ruperts’ or Julius Malema” whenever something is written about haemorrhoids or ingrown toenails.
It does get tedious after a while.
While I don’t write on global political economy for Daily Maverick, I can honestly state that the biggest conservative streaks I will die for are my love for black and white (film) photography and Test cricket. Yet, I have been accused of being a shill for the CIA and a few times for white monopoly capital. Those claims and accusations are just intellectual laziness.
Vacuous criticisms
Many of the criticisms aimed at Maughan are based on vacuity that makes it impossible to properly identify or draw meaning from such emptiness – much like throwing around words like “neoliberalism,” “fascism,” “racism” or “anti-Semite” serve as clichés, soundbites and insults that are precisely ad hominem attacks.
There are, to be sure, anti-Semites or racists and fascists, neoliberals and anarcho-capitalists among us, but we give them a pass by reducing these words to emptiness or meaningless. The only meaning, I would suggest, is the warning by Walter Benjamin that every charge of fascism (of CIA sponsorship) contains precisely that which it seeks to condemn.
What holds the critiques of Maughan together is the argumentum ad hominem. To paraphrase Karl Marx (in personal correspondence with Heinrich Heine about the Ludwig Börne affair), the screeds against Maughan are clumsy treatment at the hands of the imbecile.
Then again, we are in an era where there really is no difficulty in finding literary or journalistic laziness and clumsiness – and a lack of credibility.
My deepest concern is that such intellectual laziness leads to propaganda presented as journalism (or history, for that matter), description passing for analysis, and people not quite understanding the difference between opinion and reportage… We, the males in journalism, have to continue stepping aside, as did Theodore Adorno (and Walter Benjamin), so that women (like Greta Karplus’s) work can be recognised and appraised for its substance on the basis of facts and the closer it gets to truth.
We may never get to the truth (paraphrasing Elie Wiesel on justice), but that should never stop the passage towards it. The ad hominem attacks on Karyn Maughan are intellectually lazy, ideologically misguided and a waste of time.
I am not particularly given to spirituality, but there is a delightfully apposite passage by the Persian poet, Shams Tabrizi, that is worth putting this discussion to rest – a message to Maughan’s critics: “The summary of the advice of all prophets is this. Find yourself a mirror.” DM