Opinion: Amusing ourselves to death
America won the internet, and now we all speak its language.
Infotainment reigns supreme here in South Africa.
Give the punters something to think about, but not too deeply, then package it in such a way that they feel comfortably informed.
In a communications-saturated world small nuggets, delivered with edge, are what readers and viewers want. Right?
Perhaps we are intellectually lazy. Who has the time to work through conflicting reports to figure out what’s important and what is reality.
We do. It is vital that we make time for that, lest we become media illiterate.
Take, for example, the recent fine meted out to eNCA for hosting a rabid anti-Semite and conspiracy theorist.
Former radio presenter Gareth Cliff, who now hosts a programme on eNCA, caused a stir when he announced that David Icke would appear on his show. Icke’s appearance led to spirited debate about “freedom of expression”.
Icke claims to believe, among other things, that an interdimensional race of reptilian beings runs the global economy and that the British royal family is a knot of shape-shifting lizards. We don’t know if this is in relation to Prince Phillip, but that’s a discussion for another day.
Cliff and his show landed in hot water for spreading “dangerous misinformation” about Covid-19 and have been fined R10 000.
This is after an official ruling by the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa (BCCSA) that stated it had fined e.tv and eNCA for airing an episode of Cliff’s show, So What Now? on July 22. The fine is to be paid by November 15 to the registrar of the BCCSA. It’s worth noting the BCCSA cannot compel eNCA to take down the episode from its website.
Twitter has since permanently suspended Icke’s account for violating its rules regarding coronavirus misinformation. The move follows the decision by YouTube and Facebook to terminate Icke’s accounts in early May for the same reason.
Icke has made controversial, unproven claims about the virus on several internet platforms, including a discredited theory that it is linked to the rollout of the 5G mobile network.
Icke, like many shock jocks of yore, exploits the apparent need by broadcasters to show controversy couched as objectivity to drive ratings. You don’t have to look further than Fox News in the United States to see what lies down that path.
“We report, you decide.” That was Fox News Network’s slogan until 2018.
Over the past two decades, the media across the world has entertained the mendacious bilge spewed by entertaining but ultimately untruthful bad actors because of “bothsideism”. This pursuit of objectivity has been bastardised to the point at which it has furthered lies and did nothing to inform readers in a meaningful way. We employed the time-honored method of treating information as dichotomous and presented both sides of a news scenario as fair, equal or true. But it was almost criminally and homicidally misleading during a global pandemic. The truth isn’t objective. It just is.
Mainstream journalists have been so worried about being labelled as biased that we have given oxygen to opinions that are blatantly untrue, employing euphemism and hyperbole to seem fair. False balance is damaging and cannot be allowed to kill simple truth-telling.
We do not exist in a vacuum. Each of us brings our lived experiences and our own prejudices to this office. And we do make judgments about what to cover and what to ignore, based on our values and our capacity.
But our commitment is to manage ourselves, and our biases, to do journalism that is independent, rather than being suffocated in the chokehold of objectivity.
By Kiri Rupiah & Luke Feltham