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Too much coverage - and not enough

Thursday, August 28, 2008

FIFTEEN THOUSAND – THAT MAGIC NUMBER is the widely-touted total of media workers accredited to the Democratic Convention in Denver. And that’s an awful lot of newsgatherers for an event that long ago stopped generating news.

Right from the opening night this week, CNN showcased a chorus of hosts and commentators complaining about the show, initially piling in on what seemed to them a terrible long lull between Edward Kennedy’s poignant appearance and Michelle Obama’s well-crafted and appealingly-delivered speech (above left). These proclaimed political "experts" griped to each other in degradingly showbizzy terms.

 

Variously, but in mutually echoing tones, they carped that ... the pace was wrong … the star-power was lacking … it was a waste of good prime-time ... and so on. They sounded just like so many event-planners or musical theater reviewers – or maybe panelists on the Fox Network’s American Idol.

 

I myself have not attended a US national party convention since there stopped being any real contest for a nomination (in 1976) and I’m even happier now than I was in the 80s not to be part of the conventioneeering press crowd.

 

With those intervening decades the internet, too, has of course transformed the media landscape, and apart from the hordes of accredited professionals there are now even greater legions of off-site observers churning out their blogged observations and idiosyncratic critiques.

 

This week I was in - okay, I’ll admit it - a nostalgia-ridden mood that was deepened by reading ex-New York Times correspondent/editor John Darnton’s hilarious new mystery novel, a roman a clef titled Black and White and Dead All Over (and set in a lightly disguised old Times building). And so I found myself bemoaning the state of newsgathering today along with another Timesman, its now-retired “Enforcer of Standards” Bill Borders - who would hate that unofficial moniker.

 

Borders and I tut-tutted together about the comparative dearth of old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting nowadays, and the overweening amount of desk-bound, internet-based cutting-and-pasting that too often manages to pass as journalism.

 

But place our grumpy nostalgia aside, and just be my guest for a moment. Range broadly across every single internet outlet you can consult about the Denver convention, be it through newspapers’ sites or those of magazines, broadcasters, aggregators or individual bloggers … and see how much information you encounter that you could honestly call “news”.

 

   

 

**A RADIO DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN AIRS EVERY WEEK ON CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

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MEANWHILE, MY OWN OLD-STYLE ear to the ground is hearing stories that I feel sad, and frankly reluctant, to report.

 

Regular readers of THE MEDIA BEAT will know that I’ve long documented the struggle for freedom and justice in South Africa, and that I’ve have developed a considerable admiration for the best representatives of the African National Congress, which spearheaded that struggle - and which now of course forms, unassailably, the government of that country.

 

Now as I write, it seems possible that President Thabo Mbeki, with whom I had a long and at times close relationship, might just possibly be on the point of pulling off a settlement in the deeply troubled neighboring country of Zimbabwe (much against my expectations, I’ll concede - for I have often faulted Mbeki's fecklessness on this and other policy questions).

 

But here’s the distressing irony. The very same hot-button issue with which Zimbabwe’s now-monstrous dictator Robert Mugabe so egregiously began to cause, in his wayward, wanton fashion, the destruction of his own country -  the issue of land reform - is going increasingly awry in the new, promisingly free and democratic South Africa.

 

It was always the laudable aim of the ANC to transfer land, grabbed unjustly by the white minority from the nineteenth century onward (creating the grotesque proportions of 10% of the population holding nearly 90% of the land) into the hands of the black majority, and to do it through a process which was orderly and both economically and politically stable. But now that process is in danger of breaking down, fourteen years after the ANC’s Restitution of Land Rights Act was first enacted.

 

Little international press attention has been devoted to this looming crisis - and like many other liberation-supporting journalists, I’m loath to dwell on a problem that sometimes can be used, as in Zimbabwe, by white racist hold-outs to decry black progress.

 

But the hard truth is that out of the roughly one-third of the commercially-farmed (and inevitably white-owned) rural land that the ANC planned to redistribute, only a lamentably low figure of 4% has actually changed hands.

 

And what transfers have been completed are leaving both the landless and the landed very angry. Take for example Ishmael N’tswana, a long-time supporter of the ANC who is leading some 9,000 claimants in an effort to gain possession of 78 white-owned farms in Limpopo Province, but who says that the government ministers he voted for “have failed in handling this issue”.

   

 

ON THE OTHER SIDE, THE FURY of the commercial farmers’ association Agri SA is forcefully represented by Theo De Jager who complains bitterly about once theoretically acceptable “willing seller – willing buyer” arrangements, like the one under which a well-developed property left his hands and ended up with a black owner, who let it decay into total uselessness after just three years. Since then he’s bought another farm, only to find it too being claimed now – by N’tswana’s group as it happens – and this time De Jager plans to resist.

 

For his part, N’tswana voices a dissatisfaction that’s widespread among the informed but landless populace, admitting that he and others have a poor track-record in managing farms they have taken over. “The necessary support was not there”, he says, blaming the government for an ill thought-out program. “If we’re given the land and if we don’t have enough capital, enough capacity-building and training, what do you expect?”

 

While Agri SA agitates in protest, its often more militant regional fellow-activists, leaders of the Transvaal Agricultural Union, are making dire noises. In the national press the Union’s die-hard spokesperson on property rights Willie Lewies (above right) has accused the government of “creating a Zimbabwe”, while I heard another, more rank-and-file member take up the theme in a slightly different, and more menacing way: “This is not Zimbabwe," he said. "It won’t be just one farmer standing against a group. There will be much more than one farmer. It can get very, very ugly.”

 

The Union’s press releases are highlighting murders in rural areas, connecting them as much as they can with what they call “farm occupations”, a loaded phrase borrowed from the ruined country to the north.

 

In Johannesburg the Centre for Development and Enterprise is concerned about the wider effect on South Africa’s economy. Its Executive Director Ann Bernstein says: “The uncertainty around land and property rights is not where this country wants to be. We don’t know how many foreign investors look at South Africa and say ‘I’m nervous about that issue; it looks just like Zimbabwe’ – which would be wrong. But they then make a decision to go to some other emerging market.”

 

And the ANC government’s response? It has been trying to push an Expropriation Bill through Parliament, giving ministers the power to acquire land at prices they determine themselves “in the public interest”. A great outcry has forced the government to shelve it for right now, but this week Thandi Tobias-Pokolo, chairperson of the parliamentary committee in charge, said she hoped to re-introduce it.

 

I profess the greatest respect for the ANC’s party strategists … as I’ve shadowed them from violent township streets to forlorn headquarters in exile, to guerrilla camps in the bush and to conferences on Wall Street … but I can hardly think this is the answer. Ann Bernstein says the planned new law is attacking commercial farmers as “scapegoats for what is in fact government inefficiency and lack of capacity”.

 

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