Forty years ago this month, I was in the newsroom of the Rand Daily Mail when the editorial staff were told that the newspaper and its Sunday sister, the Sunday Express, were going out of business.
I was relatively new to the craft of journalism. With a heavy sigh, I thought that the space for independent newspapers, such as it was, was shrinking. I was probably a bit mournful about the fact that my fledgling career as a newspaper photographer and reporter was suddenly stunted and that I had to find new ways to forge the career I had only just started.
Like many people of that generation, I have come a long way.
After the final edition of the Rand Daily Mail, on 30 April 1985, independent newspapers, intellectually honest journalism and journalists who carried intellectual integrity with pride, would battle on, and with the Weekly Mail, the New Nation and Vrye Weekblad, continued to be a source of a healthy and vibrant life for the craft.
The big media houses, the Argus Company and South African Associated Newspapers (SAAN), what we have come to regard as the “legacy media”, continued to emulate the “European” world’s main newspapers, most notably The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal (as well as The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and to a limited extent, The Guardian).
This was most especially so with the US obsession with scientism — if it can’t be measured or observed through the senses, it mattered naught — and objectivity, which considered the difference between right and wrong as a representation of the Democrat-Republican or Labour-Conservative divides in the US and the UK, respectively.
One need only look (Critically, with a capital C) at the perverse relationship that journalists and politicians shared in “the lobby” of Westminster. This is when there emerges a type of institutionalised dependency between journalists and their sources. It’s good to bear all that in mind, but let us not get too distracted.
A craft rent asunder
Much has happened over the past four decades. What has been most disturbing, at least for those of us who (still) imagine that there exists a standard model of professional journalism, is that the craft has been rent asunder, so to speak.
We are now faced with a proliferation of journalisms that compete not for ethical standards, empirically verifiable facts, reliable and respectable commentary, and analyses and opinion, but for “clicks” and “likes” and “followers”.
Everyone with a smartphone and access to the internet is now a journalist. All the while we see more aggressive forms of advocacy journalism, development journalism, adversarial journalism and a type of journalism that is of our age.
This is the journalism bought and sold by philanthrocapitalism, where oligarchs have collapsed their ownership of media platforms into politics. We are approaching a situation — we may already be there — where we may have the best journalism that money can buy.
And it is not a comforting thought. Journalism, Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, has said, was being remade, and this “remaking” mattered.
Things have progressed rapidly since Rusbridger published his book, and the most recent developments, or at least the developments of the past two decades, are forcing us to “rethink journalism”. I have nothing much to add to that, but what I do fear is the rise of the idea that the best journalism can now be bought and sold — and commodified.
Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg owns Facebook and Instagram, and Elon Musk owns X. Each one of Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk have placed themselves within the guardrails of whatever ideology Donald Trump may represent.
Bezos has unapologetically turned The Washington Post’s opinion pages into his Washington Post, as ideological muscle for free market fundamentalism and personal liberties.
As Ben Burgis of Rutgers University in the US wrote, Bezos “finally dropped the pretence. The world’s third-richest man has decreed that The Washington Post, which he purchased back in 2013, will no longer publish opinions that challenge free market economics… Bezos has laid bare what critics have long suspected: when billionaires buy newspapers, they aren’t just after profitable investments; they’re buying ideological bodyguards.”
For better or for worse, some of us still believe in standard models of professional journalism. We are, however, culturally different from content creators, influencers and people who prowl (and troll) the comments sections of online media.
We’re competing against a techno-cultural wave that is rising almost daily and forcing us to get “likes”, “follows” and “subscriptions”, as opposed to bringing consumers news and information that helps them make better decisions about their daily lives.
We also face increased accusations of being “fake news” by people who take their cue from influencers like Joe Rogan, whose podcast is followed by about 14 million people on Spotify.
The legacy media is not free from the seductions of the new journalisms and competing with the commentariat of trolls and influencers. Speaking of “new journalism”, I remain gobsmacked by the small group of people I (quite) accidentally met up with in New York City to discuss “the new journalism” back in 1982. I still think it was a dream, but there are pictures!
Patriotic journalism
Anyway, one of the more startling (very recent) pieces of commentary by the legacy media in the US left an indelible mark about the toxicity of patriotic journalism.
One of the principles I have adhered to as a journalist and analyst and commentary writer is to avoid patriotism of any kind — especially status quo patriotism… It has to do with stepping away from “the lobby” (the Parliamentary Press Gallery of the last white Parliament) and going out into the world and learning new things, or at least learning how to consider old things in new ways.
During a 1 March broadcast on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, a darling of liberals in the US, considered it inappropriate that “the president and Vice-President JD Vance screamed at our ally Volodymyr Zelensky... Switching sides in a war, now standing against our allies of the past 80 years, now siding with Russia instead; I mean, no longer siding with the free world, now siding with the authoritarian governments of the world”.
In a single sweep, Maddow reminded everyone about the US’s “allies of the past 80 years” and repeated the mantric myths and intellectual laziness of expressions about “the free world” and “authoritarian governments”. Surely, intellectual honesty and integrity should place a journalist outside patriotic zeal and jingoism?
All told, the greatest danger to a standard model of professional journalism, such as it is, may well be philanthrocapitalism and the tendency among philanthropists to “do good” only to “look good”. They use economic capital and pay a high price for symbolic capital so they can place themselves on the right side of history.
That’s actually a lot more benign when compared with the social media owners who are in it for the money, but pretend that what they’re doing is for the “common good”.
Philanthrocapitalism
It has become almost impossible to avoid donor funding in a world dominated by philanthrocapitalism. A study by the UK scholars Martin Scott, Mel Bunce and Kate Wright, “Donor Power and the News” — published at about the time that Alan Rusbridger urged a rethink of journalism — showed that at that time ABC News, AllAfrica.com, Al Jazeera, El País, The Guardian, National Public Radio, PBS’ Newshour, and Public Radio International had all received funding from donors — private citizens who pay to look good, as it were.
An especially curious case is that of ProPublica in the US, which presents itself as an investigative journalism organisation that focuses on perceived or actual abuses of power by governments, businesses and other entities.
ProPublica receives funds and has revenues in excess of $40-million — almost every cent of which comes from private donors. At what point do you realise that whoever pays the piper calls the tune?
Let me go back to the start, somewhere. When Vrye Weekblad published its last edition at the end of last month — having resisted the seduction and easy money of donors and the slush funds of philanthrocapitalism — a small piece of my career died.
What’s left to say, now (there’s a lot more, actually) is that the issue of philanthropy journalism will not go away. Between the oligarchs of the world, philanthrocapitalism, social media and artificial intelligence, the future of what was journalism has probably arrived.
Last month, the Italian newspaper Il Foglio announced that it had published an entire edition using AI.
It makes our work as public intellectuals even more difficult. We have to address questions about the purposes of philanthropy, about the transparency of news media (funded by philanthrocapitalist enterprises), and about the “public interest”.
I should admit that it is almost impossible to get away from philanthrocapitalist interventions to acquire the best journalism that money can buy, but I worry about the future of journalism — much more now than in those fatal early days of my professional life (when the Rand Daily Mail and Sunday Express were shut down) — and the craft to which I have dedicated most of my adult life. DM