Opinionistas

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed are not that of Daily Maverick.....

This article is more than a year old

Internet’s populism the biggest threat to serious columnists and opinion writers

14 Aug 2024

Contrary to what it may seem, columnists don’t have the luxury of Elon Musk-esque slander; they are bound by cost factors, institutional constraints and conditionalities, and generally have to remain within bounds of respectability, legality and general codes of conduct.

The place and purpose of commentary and of opinion writers in the news media, among columnists in particular, has changed significantly with the advent of social media and blogging – and of the comments section of online media. But South African columnists seem to be holding their own in these times of change.

Blogging, most notably micro-blogging platforms like X, has almost completely erased the lines between opinions or commentaries that are based on facts and/or on ideas, and have become spaces for name-calling, malice and chauvinism.

A recent X post, by the broadcast journalist, Lester Kiewit – a fairly reasonable assertion about the lack of reading in South Africa – provoked quite obscene and deeply insulting responses.

We probably have to learn to live with this online populism, framed as it has been as democratisation or Elon Musk-esque free speech, where anyone and everyone can say anything as long as they have access to the internet. For what it’s worth, I can’t get myself to censor what is said or written.

Contrary to what it may seem, columnists don’t have the luxury of Musk-esque slander; they are bound by cost factors, institutional constraints and conditionalities, and generally have to remain within bounds of respectability, legality and general codes of conduct.

Few limits

Bloggers have very few limitations. They are, nonetheless, part of the bulging swells of ePunditry.

What then, is the purpose of columnists? What should it be? Can the columnist survive? (The comments section of this column will no doubt demonstrate the vindictiveness and overall mean-spirited responses to opinions that make the reader uncomfortable.)

At the best of times, columnists tend to rely on facts as much as they rely on ideas, beliefs and values. Day-to-day news reporting can appear detached and ‘objective’ while the columnist is able to weave her own story or understanding in and out of a column.

As Brian McNair of Strathclyde University in Scotland wrote, the columnist “stresses the ‘I’. Where the reporter says ‘this is what happened’, the columnist says, ‘here is the news, as reported elsewhere. This is what I think about it’.” (Pulling Newspapers Apart: Analysing Print Journalism, p 109.)

This weaving of one’s own story in and out of a column is easier when the writer drifts towards essayism or literary non-fiction. In general, the columnist draws on her own insights, lived experience and life world, as well as facts, though in the world in which we live, ‘facts’ are not like shooting stars that appear without our effort.

This is not to say that facts do not matter, absolutely not. It is simply to say that facts on their own do not tell stories independent of our efforts to harvest, curate and present them to tell the stories to which we want to give prominence and import. In this sense, the significance of facts, placing them in contexts and giving them meaning, is probably as important as simply presenting the facts.

Journalism is not a scientific process of taking facts and placing them intact on pages of news media. This purely ‘evidence-based’ or ‘scientific-based’ approach to journalism (and politics), is one of the early promises of our times; what the late Daniel Bell, the journalist-turned-academic, described as “the coming post-industrial society”.

It is part of the Americanisation of the world; a shift towards ‘rationality’ and ‘efficiency’ (of crude scientism, posing as objectivism), and away from concerns about social welfare, equality and justice (see this easy introduction to Bell’s thought).

This approach invariably leads to duller debate, less heterogeneity, less generativity of opinion, and less public philosophy, which cannot be healthy for knowledge production and dissemination of information. We might as well surrender journalism to artificial intelligence.

South African columnists

We are a long way from the idea of the commentator/columnist as sage. Their main role remains as analysts, gadflies and critics, and even propagandists for ideas, philosophies and vested interests.

The columnist’s role is to not simply detect and identify problems, but also to place them in the context of a plurality of lifeworlds with confidence so that the public, politicians and legislators can make better, or at least more honest, decisions.

South Africa has a mixed bag of columnists. An inexhaustive list shows that some of South Africa’s prominent featured columnists have had respectable careers as journalists with extensive experience in newsrooms.

This is at least true of notable columnists like Peter Bruce (former editor of Business Day); Barney Mthombothi (former editor of Financial Mail); John Dludlu (former editor of Sowetan); Ray Hartley (former editor of the Sunday Times); Chris Roper (former editor of the Mail & Guardian), Marianne Thamm (a veteran journalist); Justice Malala (former publisher of Sowetan and Sunday World) or Ferial Haffajee (Associate Editor of Daily Maverick).

Their experience is evident in the columns they produce, notwithstanding how strident the critiques and opinions may seem.

Many more columnists are drawn from outside the craft; from government, political parties or think tanks.

Most notable among these columnists are people like Duma Gqubule (research associate at the Social Policy Initiative); Peter Attard Montalto (consultant with Krutham Capital Markets and Financial Services agency); Ayabonga Cawe (Chief Commissioner at the International Trade Administration Commission); Jabulani Sikhakhane (former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, and editor of The Conversation Africa); Neva Makgetla (a senior researcher with Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies); Tessa Dooms (National Planning Commissioner and Director of the Rivonia Circle think tank); or William Gumede (Associate Professor, School of Governance at the University of the Witwatersrand and Executive Chairperson of Democracy Works Foundation).

Among others, Hartley, Gumede and Dludlu were trained and worked as journalists and now work for think tanks or interest groups. It is very rare for a columnist to be drawn from a specific area of technical expertise. The most notable among these is Wandile Sihlobo, Chief Economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa whose main contributions focus on agriculture. This area-specific expertise is not important for most columnists.

Not experts

I especially like Steven Glover’s comment that “columnists don’t have to be experts. If they were, they wouldn’t be columnists. They may have their little areas of expertise to which they can return, a sort of port in a storm, but most of the time they are on the wide-open seas”.

For political columnists, the greater the distance from political decision-makers, the greater the chance of bringing an independent and critical voice to discussions. I certainly had much closer relations with politicians when I worked as a reporter and a political correspondent than I do now as a full-time columnist and essayist.

The balance is certainly in favour of think tanks, consulting firms or government agencies. This split, apparently uneven, is between commentators and opinion writers who remain organically linked to journalism, and those who are embedded in institutions outside the craft.

It is relatively easier to figure out which side of an issue the columnist would support explicitly or tacitly. A key factor is whether they have come from journalism and have stayed independent regardless of their current professional situation. The difference, of course, is whether they are directly associated with think tanks, donors or philanthropists, or government agencies, and whether or not their writing is constrained or conditioned by any of the above.

This does not always apply. There are former journalists who have joined think tanks, or the World Bank, for that matter, as they have a right to, and who may promote ‘free speech’ or ‘let the facts speak for themselves’, but they adhere to the institution’s ‘official line’.

In these situations you can say anything you like, but not that which your institution dislikes.

South African commentators and columnists are a mixed bag and, for now, remain in place. They’re not paid as well as elsewhere - a long way from the £60,000 the late William Rees-Mogg earned for one weekly column in The Independent, added to the £120,000 he earned for two columns a week in The Times during the early 1990s when Julie Burchill reportedly earned £120,000 for a weekly Mail on Sunday column.

The late Jeremy Tunstall of City University in London estimated that in the early 1990s, the average fee was about £1,000 per column, and annual salaries typically between £25,000 and £75,000 for weekly columnists. (See this source, and p180 of Tunstall’s book, Newspaper Power: The New Press in Britain).

One can only imagine what British columnists are paid today. The media is much more dynamic three decades on, and apparently poorer.

Social media

Social media has introduced many more voices, very many of which are unconstrained. The news media have, for now, not replaced experienced journalists and corporate-embedded individuals (as regular columnists) with AI or with vituperative voices.

If we look hard enough we may find propagandistic voices (mainly around ideas, or wilfully manufactured ‘common sense’), but this is not unusual – it never has been. As it goes, there is no functional homogeneity across columns. There are at least five categories of columns (apart from food, film or broken hearts):

Columns that build up geographic, political or socioeconomic communities of interest;

Columns that use expert, popular, celebrity, famous or controversial columnists, to gain ‘likes’ or ‘clicks’;

Columns that use ‘magisterial columnists’ to reinforce the editorial line;

Columns offering ‘licensed contradiction’, where a writer is allowed to go against a paper’s official position in order to create an overall impression of pluralism; and

Columns providing an ‘unofficial extension of a predominant ideology or prejudice’ where the columnist is allowed to express a view in more extreme terms than would be politic in the leader columns.

Columns that rest entirely on single-story opinions may be useful, but they can also be quite tedious after a while; you can only write “so-and-so is a dog” once or twice as a columnist – beyond that, you have to find something new, something original and something challenging and present new information (and perspectives).

Columnists are in the business of changing minds using facts and insights, ideas and history (as well as theory, I would like to add), as well as the business of entertainment. A Chris Roper column is always as insightful as it is entertaining. Roper always wakes up our imagination. I’m not sure many of us can pull off the entertainment and the inspiration parts.

It is in our imagination where all thinking and writing resides. We can only wish that among us there are those who can imagine a better world, and not accept the one we’re in as it is. DM

Categories:

Opinionistas

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

Opinionistas

Few limits

South African columnists

Not experts

Social media