I'm a self-confessed Obama fan. The man remains a charismatic darling in my eyes, and despite the novelty of his blackness in the whiteness of the, uhm, White House having worn off, I still think - hope, wishes - that he will have a successful term as president, not least because, yes, I do wish the first black US president to be a success, a BLACK success story- there, I've said it :) BUT ... this is NO REASON for those, likeminded, like the Norwegian Nobel Committee, clearly, to get ahead of themselves.Obama has simply done NOTHING to justify the award of Nobel Peace Prize...by his own admission, too.
I just read through the Committee's text that briefly sets out its reasons, and it is patently unconcinving. It refers to Obama's amazing work on a number of fronts: 1) general multilateralism being restored, in particular the role of the UN; 2)great strides having been made, apparently, in reducing global nuclear armament; 3) the US's role in being a human rights beacon is being restored; 4) climate change leadership from the US being aMAzing; and - for kicks - 5) Obama being inspirational.
The only claim here that is true, at this point, is 5) - and even then only if you do not speak to Republican Americans :) The other reasons are a wish list, not reality.
1. The UN has yet to restore it's credibility. The day it is able to reign in countries like Iran or Zim more effectively, we can buy this claim. Security Council reform would help too.
2. Global nuclear disarmanent remains a goal only.
3. The US is not a human rights champion - *cough* Guantanamo *cough*
4. We need to wait until the Denmark negotiations to see if a decent replacement for Kyoto Protocol is found - and the US can start by NOT being one of the worst polluters: that would be leadership.
If this award is one intended to inspire Obama and the US to get to where the committee thinks they already are, then ok - but I'm not sure that should be the aim of the award, and if it is, let's be honest about the fact that it is an incentive, an encouragement and not so much a prize for achievements that are already on record.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Long, hard road ahead to journalistic excellence
THE quality of public discourse in SA is poor. Simply scan the letters and opinion pages of major newspapers, observe presentations and discussions at conferences on the university circuit, or sit through current affairs programmes on radio or TV.
There are a number of reasons for this: a web of problems in our education system; deep income inequality that shapes the individual learning experience; and a South African penchant for substituting reasoned debate with attributions of malicious motives, often based on race or class.
Precisely because the reasons are so complex, improving the standard of public discourse won’t be easy. But one entity we can hold to account immediately is the media.
A little intellectual curiosity from journalists would go a long way to solving the problem. We need not wait for structural changes to the education system or improved socioeconomic indices to produce legions of intellectuals. Indeed, the media can help us attain these levels of education by improving the quality of their reportage and analysis that are offered to the public.
Many media professionals have tried to convince me that local readers, listeners and viewers are the ones lacking in curiosity. But that, surely, is thoughtless projection at best. It does not justify pedestrian analysis.
Of course, one needs to take account of the context within which a piece of writing or broadcasting content is produced. But I do not believe the condescending assumption that the average South African lacks the attention span to read at least one essay- length piece of social or political analysis a week.
I take issue with the unspoken editorial assumption that a piece of writing that is of a standard good enough for top international publications such as the Times Literary Supplement or New York Times has no place in any of our top dailies or weekend newspapers. This assumption that local readers lack intellectual curiosity says less about the attention span or thirst for analysis of the local reader, listener or viewer than it does about the lack of intellectual curiosity of local media professionals.
Journalists mask their intellectual vices by internalising the lie that those consuming their ideas share these character flaws.
To be fair to the print media, broadcasting is in much worse shape. This is, of course, partly due to the fact that decent, if dry, comment from local celebrity academics sneaks into the odd newspaper comment space; and week-old content from The Guardian or Los Angeles Times, or some other paid-for portal of old international essays, gets republished in our weekend newspapers as a convenient substitute for local content. Has-been politicians, milked for the sales value of their bylines even when they have little fresh to say, complete the comment space.
Reportage, on the other hand, is mostly lacking in analytic content, although a few investigative journalists sometimes produce award-winning stories.
Broadcasting is more honest about its mediocrity. If I were an international investor looking for political risk analysis of southern Africa, South African news or political anchors would be the last people I would turn to. Our news and current affairs teams on radio and television lack that kind of gravitas.
It is little wonder that they mostly generate second-hand content that is picked up from newspapers and magazines. Even programmes such as Special Assignment and SAfm’s After 8 Debate have lost their legendary bite.
Journalists should start to read more widely, and do better primary research. The pressure of deadlines is real, but is no excuse for not reading widely and thinking hard. One cannot sit in Auckland Park or Rosebank and know what it is that protesters in Mpumalanga think. Nor can a young journalist, even with his baby face caked in Maybelline make- up, complete with Model C enunciation, “live from the scene”, give us the true, hidden facts and insights of a complex story by simply pulling the closest local towards the cameras for a pseudo-interview. This is not to suggest that immediate, and continuous, news coverage is unimportant. But there is not sufficient balance between these minute-by- minute broadcasts and more carefully researched, broadcast packages.
Call me the colonial victim of an English sojourn, but I would love to one day wake up to a morning radio programme in SA that sets the news and current affairs agenda in a similarly powerful manner as does, for example, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio 4 slot, The Today Programme. The key difference between it and SAfm’s AM Live? Again, intellectual curiosity. Intellectual curiosity means reading widely, doing primary research, thinking carefully about your argument, and soliciting — demanding — critical feedback and coaching from peers.
We cannot regard a typo-free piece of writing as the ideal (and, even then, an ideal at any rate routinely ignored by many editors and sub-editors), nor a 30-second audio insert devoid of “ums”, as articulate and compelling.
The road to journalistic excellence is necessarily tough.
McKaiser (www.safferpolitics.co.za) is a political and social analyst at the Centre for the Study of Democracy.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=83543
There are a number of reasons for this: a web of problems in our education system; deep income inequality that shapes the individual learning experience; and a South African penchant for substituting reasoned debate with attributions of malicious motives, often based on race or class.
Precisely because the reasons are so complex, improving the standard of public discourse won’t be easy. But one entity we can hold to account immediately is the media.
A little intellectual curiosity from journalists would go a long way to solving the problem. We need not wait for structural changes to the education system or improved socioeconomic indices to produce legions of intellectuals. Indeed, the media can help us attain these levels of education by improving the quality of their reportage and analysis that are offered to the public.
Many media professionals have tried to convince me that local readers, listeners and viewers are the ones lacking in curiosity. But that, surely, is thoughtless projection at best. It does not justify pedestrian analysis.
Of course, one needs to take account of the context within which a piece of writing or broadcasting content is produced. But I do not believe the condescending assumption that the average South African lacks the attention span to read at least one essay- length piece of social or political analysis a week.
I take issue with the unspoken editorial assumption that a piece of writing that is of a standard good enough for top international publications such as the Times Literary Supplement or New York Times has no place in any of our top dailies or weekend newspapers. This assumption that local readers lack intellectual curiosity says less about the attention span or thirst for analysis of the local reader, listener or viewer than it does about the lack of intellectual curiosity of local media professionals.
Journalists mask their intellectual vices by internalising the lie that those consuming their ideas share these character flaws.
To be fair to the print media, broadcasting is in much worse shape. This is, of course, partly due to the fact that decent, if dry, comment from local celebrity academics sneaks into the odd newspaper comment space; and week-old content from The Guardian or Los Angeles Times, or some other paid-for portal of old international essays, gets republished in our weekend newspapers as a convenient substitute for local content. Has-been politicians, milked for the sales value of their bylines even when they have little fresh to say, complete the comment space.
Reportage, on the other hand, is mostly lacking in analytic content, although a few investigative journalists sometimes produce award-winning stories.
Broadcasting is more honest about its mediocrity. If I were an international investor looking for political risk analysis of southern Africa, South African news or political anchors would be the last people I would turn to. Our news and current affairs teams on radio and television lack that kind of gravitas.
It is little wonder that they mostly generate second-hand content that is picked up from newspapers and magazines. Even programmes such as Special Assignment and SAfm’s After 8 Debate have lost their legendary bite.
Journalists should start to read more widely, and do better primary research. The pressure of deadlines is real, but is no excuse for not reading widely and thinking hard. One cannot sit in Auckland Park or Rosebank and know what it is that protesters in Mpumalanga think. Nor can a young journalist, even with his baby face caked in Maybelline make- up, complete with Model C enunciation, “live from the scene”, give us the true, hidden facts and insights of a complex story by simply pulling the closest local towards the cameras for a pseudo-interview. This is not to suggest that immediate, and continuous, news coverage is unimportant. But there is not sufficient balance between these minute-by- minute broadcasts and more carefully researched, broadcast packages.
Call me the colonial victim of an English sojourn, but I would love to one day wake up to a morning radio programme in SA that sets the news and current affairs agenda in a similarly powerful manner as does, for example, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio 4 slot, The Today Programme. The key difference between it and SAfm’s AM Live? Again, intellectual curiosity. Intellectual curiosity means reading widely, doing primary research, thinking carefully about your argument, and soliciting — demanding — critical feedback and coaching from peers.
We cannot regard a typo-free piece of writing as the ideal (and, even then, an ideal at any rate routinely ignored by many editors and sub-editors), nor a 30-second audio insert devoid of “ums”, as articulate and compelling.
The road to journalistic excellence is necessarily tough.
McKaiser (www.safferpolitics.co.za) is a political and social analyst at the Centre for the Study of Democracy.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=83543
Thursday, October 8, 2009
COPE, born of despair not vision, faces political death
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=83424
ONCE upon a time there was a political party called the Congress of the People (COPE). It was born of some comrades’ frustration with the direction in which a post-Polokwane African National Congress (ANC) was headed. But, despite some electoral goodwill (7,42% of the national vote went to the COPE), it seems to be exiting the political stage more quickly than former president Thabo Mbeki .
Perhaps COPE’s trajectory is the inevitable result of a birth that resulted less from a political pregnancy filled with ideological and policy vision, than with despair at the shenanigans of the ANC.
It is tempting, given COPE’s failure to overcome its birth pangs, to start writing a political obituary. Yet voters' yearning for a credible, black-led alternative to the ANC demand that we give it a final chance.
Perhaps. But doing so requires a blunt interrogation of what COPE needs to do to avoid justifiably being written off in the 2011 local government elections.
If COPE does not fix its in-house problems immediately, political death may well become a prudent eventuality. A provincial strategy meeting by some of the COPE leadership in Gauteng attempted to do exactly that last weekend.
First, it is shocking that the process of establishing, and building, branches has gone nowhere. Branches are the building blocks of a party. They enable effective activism and electioneering. Yet in Gauteng, for example, there are only four official COPE branches.
Given that there are 540 municipal wards in Gauteng, it is difficult to foresee how an effective groundswell of support will be garnered over the next two years unless drastically urgent administrative attention is paid to the laborious but critical task of branch building. Mosiuoa Lekota was supposedly responsible for this task, but is evidently failing. COPE needs a plan B immediately.
Some COPE leaders are convinced that while branches are useful, they are not critical. Professionals and other usually apolitical types who supported COPE during the elections are supposedly not interested in ANC- like concepts such as branches.
This assumption is doubly flawed. First, no credible political audit of the profile of supporters of COPE has been done. Surely the handful of prominent COPE members who are young professionals scribbling on a Facebook page near you do not constitute a statistically significant slice of the more than 1,3-million voters who voted for COPE in this year’s national elections.
Second, one does not ignore a political opponent’s tactics simply to avoid the label of copycat, even when these tactics are sensible.
While millions of voters did, indeed, vote for the ANC even though they are not active branch members or even registered members, ANC branches remain politically important nodes of on-the-ground political lobbying. COPE will only ever become a threat to the ANC by fishing from the same electoral pond as the ANC does. That requires the immediate development of branches across the country that can serve as alternative homes to existing ANC members.
Third, COPE must start developing something of an internal party policy think-tank or brains trust. Strategy meetings, including last weekend’s, acknowledge this, but nothing seems to get done about it the morning after.
It is not necessary, perhaps, for COPE to develop a substantively new ideology. We are all pretty much content with being liberal democrats, are we not?
Equally, the label “progressive” is about as useful as saying you prefer the good to the bad. It is simply not illuminating enough as an ideological tag.
The reality, however, is the ANC picked the most appropriate ideological outlook for our country at this juncture in its history: broadly liberal on social policy and questions of lifestyle and identity; and, on the economic front, crafting an awkward but necessary balance between neoliberal macroeconomic fundamentals, while committing to some form of welfare state and labour protection.
COPE should not be contrarian for the sake of politics. Instead, its strategy should focus on critiquing ANC policy mistakes. Not all ANC policies, or their implementation, dovetail with the ideological foundations with which most of us might otherwise agree.
COPE should enter debate at that level, rather than within the higher ideological stratosphere. Unfortunately, COPE is not featuring on the policy debate front at all. It thoughtlessly took a position on an issue such as labour brokers with little hint of well- researched evidence and argument behind the press performance.
Instead, it came across as dangerously reactive, ad hoc and politically clumsy. It topped off its political mistakes by sharing a platform with the Democratic Alliance (DA) on an issue that is not politically critical enough to risk the convenient retort from the ANC that it is a black version of the DA.
COPE made two mistakes on this occasion. First, it betrayed the fact it lacks a policy headquarters, or even an informal brains trust. Second, it demonstrated an inability to think strategically about how to liaise with the media, and so the public at large. COPE must work harder to raise the capital that will enable some of its more intellectually inclined leaders to think full time about issues of policy and communication strategy.
This, third, highlights the communication strategy problems that COPE continues to suffer from. It was initially given a honeymoon by the media. We had all desperately hoped for multiparty democracy to be given a new lease on life with COPE’s arrival.
But the party has gone from being media darling to being a nonstory at best. Just scanning party documents on media strategy show why this is not surprising.
COPE does not have a clear team of communication experts who think about the content of their website, carefully read and reread media statements before they are released or, most importantly, thinking proactively about how, where and when, to generate good news stories about the party’s development, including the performance of spokesmen when interviewed, or party leaders’ speeches when they have the public platform, both in and outside Parliament.
Instead, spokesmen such as Philip Dexter fumble through press conferences on those occasions when they are forced to interact with the media, with little enthusiasm or eloquence. This is not surprising.
A guide for spokesmen discussed at the recent regional strategy conference encouraged them to stay “on message”, suggesting winning platitudes such as “we believe in a winning SA” and “we believe SA belongs to all who believe in it”.
These truisms that all South Africans believe in were given as descriptions of COPE’s supposedly unique identity.
The sooner COPE finds an identity, any identity, the better. COPE’s future remains uncertain. Without even dipping into the more well-rehearsed internal factional and leadership squabbles, it is clear that it needs to deal with various other issues in the areas of administration, ideology, policy, finance and communications.
Nevertheless, given that the ANC’s chronic dependence on voter loyalty tied to historical memory about its role in the liberation struggle cannot last forever, it would be premature to write COPE off. But an awful lot will have to go right for COPE, and soon, if it is to avoid political death.
McKaiser is a contributing editor.
ONCE upon a time there was a political party called the Congress of the People (COPE). It was born of some comrades’ frustration with the direction in which a post-Polokwane African National Congress (ANC) was headed. But, despite some electoral goodwill (7,42% of the national vote went to the COPE), it seems to be exiting the political stage more quickly than former president Thabo Mbeki .
Perhaps COPE’s trajectory is the inevitable result of a birth that resulted less from a political pregnancy filled with ideological and policy vision, than with despair at the shenanigans of the ANC.
It is tempting, given COPE’s failure to overcome its birth pangs, to start writing a political obituary. Yet voters' yearning for a credible, black-led alternative to the ANC demand that we give it a final chance.
Perhaps. But doing so requires a blunt interrogation of what COPE needs to do to avoid justifiably being written off in the 2011 local government elections.
If COPE does not fix its in-house problems immediately, political death may well become a prudent eventuality. A provincial strategy meeting by some of the COPE leadership in Gauteng attempted to do exactly that last weekend.
First, it is shocking that the process of establishing, and building, branches has gone nowhere. Branches are the building blocks of a party. They enable effective activism and electioneering. Yet in Gauteng, for example, there are only four official COPE branches.
Given that there are 540 municipal wards in Gauteng, it is difficult to foresee how an effective groundswell of support will be garnered over the next two years unless drastically urgent administrative attention is paid to the laborious but critical task of branch building. Mosiuoa Lekota was supposedly responsible for this task, but is evidently failing. COPE needs a plan B immediately.
Some COPE leaders are convinced that while branches are useful, they are not critical. Professionals and other usually apolitical types who supported COPE during the elections are supposedly not interested in ANC- like concepts such as branches.
This assumption is doubly flawed. First, no credible political audit of the profile of supporters of COPE has been done. Surely the handful of prominent COPE members who are young professionals scribbling on a Facebook page near you do not constitute a statistically significant slice of the more than 1,3-million voters who voted for COPE in this year’s national elections.
Second, one does not ignore a political opponent’s tactics simply to avoid the label of copycat, even when these tactics are sensible.
While millions of voters did, indeed, vote for the ANC even though they are not active branch members or even registered members, ANC branches remain politically important nodes of on-the-ground political lobbying. COPE will only ever become a threat to the ANC by fishing from the same electoral pond as the ANC does. That requires the immediate development of branches across the country that can serve as alternative homes to existing ANC members.
Third, COPE must start developing something of an internal party policy think-tank or brains trust. Strategy meetings, including last weekend’s, acknowledge this, but nothing seems to get done about it the morning after.
It is not necessary, perhaps, for COPE to develop a substantively new ideology. We are all pretty much content with being liberal democrats, are we not?
Equally, the label “progressive” is about as useful as saying you prefer the good to the bad. It is simply not illuminating enough as an ideological tag.
The reality, however, is the ANC picked the most appropriate ideological outlook for our country at this juncture in its history: broadly liberal on social policy and questions of lifestyle and identity; and, on the economic front, crafting an awkward but necessary balance between neoliberal macroeconomic fundamentals, while committing to some form of welfare state and labour protection.
COPE should not be contrarian for the sake of politics. Instead, its strategy should focus on critiquing ANC policy mistakes. Not all ANC policies, or their implementation, dovetail with the ideological foundations with which most of us might otherwise agree.
COPE should enter debate at that level, rather than within the higher ideological stratosphere. Unfortunately, COPE is not featuring on the policy debate front at all. It thoughtlessly took a position on an issue such as labour brokers with little hint of well- researched evidence and argument behind the press performance.
Instead, it came across as dangerously reactive, ad hoc and politically clumsy. It topped off its political mistakes by sharing a platform with the Democratic Alliance (DA) on an issue that is not politically critical enough to risk the convenient retort from the ANC that it is a black version of the DA.
COPE made two mistakes on this occasion. First, it betrayed the fact it lacks a policy headquarters, or even an informal brains trust. Second, it demonstrated an inability to think strategically about how to liaise with the media, and so the public at large. COPE must work harder to raise the capital that will enable some of its more intellectually inclined leaders to think full time about issues of policy and communication strategy.
This, third, highlights the communication strategy problems that COPE continues to suffer from. It was initially given a honeymoon by the media. We had all desperately hoped for multiparty democracy to be given a new lease on life with COPE’s arrival.
But the party has gone from being media darling to being a nonstory at best. Just scanning party documents on media strategy show why this is not surprising.
COPE does not have a clear team of communication experts who think about the content of their website, carefully read and reread media statements before they are released or, most importantly, thinking proactively about how, where and when, to generate good news stories about the party’s development, including the performance of spokesmen when interviewed, or party leaders’ speeches when they have the public platform, both in and outside Parliament.
Instead, spokesmen such as Philip Dexter fumble through press conferences on those occasions when they are forced to interact with the media, with little enthusiasm or eloquence. This is not surprising.
A guide for spokesmen discussed at the recent regional strategy conference encouraged them to stay “on message”, suggesting winning platitudes such as “we believe in a winning SA” and “we believe SA belongs to all who believe in it”.
These truisms that all South Africans believe in were given as descriptions of COPE’s supposedly unique identity.
The sooner COPE finds an identity, any identity, the better. COPE’s future remains uncertain. Without even dipping into the more well-rehearsed internal factional and leadership squabbles, it is clear that it needs to deal with various other issues in the areas of administration, ideology, policy, finance and communications.
Nevertheless, given that the ANC’s chronic dependence on voter loyalty tied to historical memory about its role in the liberation struggle cannot last forever, it would be premature to write COPE off. But an awful lot will have to go right for COPE, and soon, if it is to avoid political death.
McKaiser is a contributing editor.
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