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2
Community Perspective, Experience and Voice
Julie Reid and Dale T. McKinley
Asmall number of mostly independent news outlets acknowledge that the real ‘experts’ on any particular news story are the people whose lives are most impacted by the events and situations that the stories describe. The Global Press Journal employs reporters who are based within the community about which they report, recognising the value of journalism that is informed by an understanding of local languages, local customs and contexts, and local histories, so that information is framed in a culturally and contextually appropriate way.
Managing editor of the Global Press Journal, Krista Kapralos (2018) describes what she terms the ‘reliability gap’: a phenomenon in dominant news journalism where predominantly Western media groups and news outlets collect and represent data and evidence based on Western normative standards, regardless of whether the situation being reported on is geographically or culturally Western. Kapralos (2018) adds:
When one culture sets the standard for truth (and implements that standard regardless of location), the narratives that culture culls from other places are likely to be warped … For many research and news agencies, the process of gathering data results in a continual confrontation between Western assumptions and non-Western cultures. While that reality makes the truth less convenient to find, there is a huge potential payoff for those who seek it in context: A meaningful negotiation between equal partners who can respectfully create systems to help determine what is true. At Global Press Journal, we believe it’s difficult – if not impossible – to determine the truth without engaging local people. Every story we publish is reported by a local person. Every story includes sources who are as close as possible to the situations described. And reporters are supported by a robust editorial team dedicated to accuracy.
The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, insists that media outlets ought to be much more representative of the societies they aim to represent. A survey conducted in the United Kingdom revealed that a privately educated elite still dominates that country’s journalism profession, and that journalism has revealed a trend towards social exclusivity more than any other profession (Weale 2016; Jones 2016). According to Viner (2017), ‘This matters because people from exclusive, homogenous backgrounds are unlikely to know anyone adversely affected by the crises of our era, or to spend time in the places where they are happening. Media organisations staffed largely by people from narrow backgrounds are less likely to recognise the issues that people notice in their communities every day as “news”; the discussions inside such organisations will inevitably be shaped by the shared privilege of the participants.’ Similar to the UK, South Africa’s public sphere is still very much an elite sphere, and mediated national conversations on matters of public interest are predominantly determined by the interests of this elite (Duncan 2013b; Friedman 2011).
There is a societal danger in the routine exclusion of some voices while over-amplifying others. A society risks only becoming aware of a mounting crisis at the grassroots level when it is too late and when there is a social explosion, such as the critical events and subsequent massacre at Marikana (Duncan 2013b). But even when not taking such extreme dangers into account, the problem of the inequitable representation of voice still matters. The most basic and fundamental societal mandate of the news media is to inform: to provide audiences with accurate, trustworthy and relevant information about the world around them.
Regarding the South African news media, this means representing a realistic picture of the country. But this is a country that includes, and is predominantly populated by, the economically marginalised and poor. Yet, voice(s) from this societal sector are habitually excluded. The segment of society that enjoys the largest representation of mediated voice is but a small portion of the citizenry. How then, are we to know what is going on in our world when we are presented with such a limited picture? Additionally, when so under-informed about a broader spectrum of realities, how can we realistically initiate national discourses aimed at societal coherence, economic development or the meaningful promotion of social justice? In simple terms, how can we solve our own problems when we have very little idea of what is really going on?
PUTTING VOICE(S) FIRST
The various research studies mentioned in chapter 1 examined the (mis)representation of voice(s) particular to a specific marginalised profile or demographic, that is, the youth, women or protestors. In this book we chose to follow a slightly different approach, and, instead of examining a broad category of marginalised persons, honed in instead on three very particular communities and sites where stories of high news value have played out. The demographic of the people we spoke to was then of secondary importance to us.
Of primary importance were the stories that each individual had to tell – their personal iteration of voice, which, of course, was nonetheless imbued with their particular demographic identity. By collecting the stories and first-hand accounts of persons who had actually lived through a particular set of events, we were able to then compare the contents of these first-hand accounts to the way in which these same events had been retold by the dominant news media. It is only a small adjustment of methodological focus, but it makes all the difference. A detailed comparison to news media content is not possible when examining the perspectives of a particular demographic of participant regardless of their individual position: here, even though each participant may belong to a similar demographic, each will have experienced a different set of events. Instead, we opted to talk to people who had lived through a particular set of events by focusing on the geographic communities where those events had taken place, meaning that we could thereafter compare the collected first-hand accounts to the manner in which these events had been retold by the dominant media.
Another important shift in methodological focus was that when we interviewed our participants, we did not approach the interview with a stringent, predetermined set of must-ask questions. Given the centrality of voice(s) to this project, we knew that we had to interrogate our own strategies of listening. On a purely practical level, this meant we needed to rethink how we were going to approach the interviews with the different participants from the three communities that we were working with in order to best allow them adequate space to narrate their own stories.
We did not ask the people we talked with to focus on any particular aspect, event or key category as identified by us. We only asked them to do one thing: we asked them to tell their story. We found that in allowing them to claim as much lateral narrative space as they liked, they related to us in far more depth, detail and richness of content than if we had interjected and tried to force their responses to focus on any set of stringent predetermined categories or questions.
Of course, this is not always a comfortable thing for a researcher or a journalist to do. We are trained to get straight to the core of a story in the least time possible, to focus only on the ‘facts’ and ignore unnecessary waffle. The arrogance of this approach, however, is that it too often denies the respectful iteration of voice(s). Firstly, it assumes a position of power on the part of the researcher or journalist. It is the researcher and/ or journalist who will decide what information is relevant and what is not and will guide the engagement accordingly. The arrogance of the myth of the ‘expert’ here disenables the notion of voice as a process of engagement and all of the richness that lies therein.
Social scientists and journalists, however, are problematically trained to approach interviews with a predetermined set of criteria in mind, or a set of research goals and objectives, which then determines the trajectory of the inflexibly formulated interview guideline or schedule (a preset list of questions that have to be asked of each interviewee). Researchers will tell you that this has to be done to ensure consistency, reliability and validity in the data, as if people’s personal accounts of their experiences and lives can be properly described by a term as impersonal as ‘data’. Journalists will tell you that this approach is necessary in order to collect only those ‘facts’ that are of relevance to the news story they are piecing together, as if the only parts of peoples’ stories that are relevant are the ones that we in our supposed ‘expert’ knowledge deem to be relevant. But as journalists and researchers, who are we, really, to say what is relevant and what is not with regard to an event that we have not lived, are not personally impacted by and of which we have no situational or historical experience? Who, then, is the real ‘expert’ on the story if not the people whose lives are directly determined by it?
Secondly, when we are too hasty to arrive at only the ‘facts’ of an isolated event, we too often miss, overlook and disregard important contextual and historical details that would more accurately inform understandings of current events. Again, this approach ignores voice as an embodied process, that it is socially grounded and that each narrative retelling of events is only one part of a broader interlocking set of related narratives.
Thirdly, the narrow, delimiting and sound-bite-driven approach to interviewing so often applied by researchers and journalists ignorantly and arrogantly bears little respect for difference and diversity, which is another key aspect in the value of voice. Again, where each voice is distinct, the failure to recognise the differences between voices is a failure to recognise voice at all. However, an engagement with the multiplicity of voice(s) that are able to speak to one event requires more patience than what the narrow, more traditional approach to interviewing allows.
Fourthly, a narrow and limited approach to interviewing does not do much in terms of respecting human dignity, or in terms of treating people as if they do in fact know how to tell their own stories. Further, simply claiming (or being allowed) the room to narrate one’s own story, or speaking, is not sufficient to effect the successful process of voice. To afford dignity to the speaker, then the speaker must know that their voice matters and that it is heard (Couldry 2010: 1). But do these voice(s) really matter to us if we insist that they only speak to the particular predetermined categories that we have established before the engagement even commences?
THE CURRENT CONTEXT: POST-1994 SOUTH AFRICA
Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will. There are many ways of reaching this point … by denying and distorting information … and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned, and where the security of a privileged few depends on the forced labour and the forced silence of the many.
— Levi in Pugliese 2016
While South Africa is certainly not a fascist state, there are just as certainly enough warning signs that should arouse serious concern for all of those who have sacrificed and continue to struggle for a vibrant and healthy democracy. As Primo Levi notes in the epigraph above, it is particularly when concentrated power and the interests of the elite begin to consistently undermine the realm of free expression, will and information – all of which are indispensable to democratic action and voice – that we should be more than concerned.
Such undermining has been well entrenched within South Africa’s political, economic and social fabric for generations, including, even if differentially applied and experienced, in the post-1994 democratic era. This is nowhere more so than when it comes to the dominant media and the perspectives, experiences and voices of poor communities. Much like the country’s economy, the media sector is highly monopolised and, as such, exclusivist in its DNA. More specifically, at the core foundation of this exclusivity is class, buttressed by considerations of race, gender and sexuality.
Here is the class reality: South Africa has ‘world-class’ inequality where 75 per cent of the aggregate wealth is held by the top 10 per cent of the population, while the bottom 50 per cent hold a mere 2.5 per cent (Simkins 2014). Not surprisingly, the overall number of people living in poverty – measured as an ‘upper bound poverty line’ of R779 (in 2016 rand) per month, per person – stands at 54 per cent (StatsSA 2015).
In structural terms then, the dominant media largely speak for and to the dominant class. In practical terms, this translates into the perspectives, experiences and voices of the majority of people who live and work in South Africa, and who are poor, being treated as peripheral. There are few better examples of this than Jane Duncan’s exposé of the coverage of the Marikana massacre by the dominant media, which clearly reveals the consequent structural and practical class bias, as described in chapter 1 (Duncan 2013a). If only one side of the story is told or is so dominant as to effectively sideline and/or caricature any counter-narrative or competing story, then the conceptual frame and practical approach of the individual reader and societal consumer can only serve to reinforce ignorance, division and untruths.
That is why it is so crucial, not simply in respect of exposing and contesting the ‘storytelling’ of the dominant media but to defending and sustaining democracy itself, that the stories of the poor majority are listened to and communicated.
Herein lies the basis for the research that underpins this book. The three communities that provide the case studies – Glebelands, Xolobeni/Amadiba and Thembelihle – were chosen because they capture a representational cross section of struggle stories from poor communities in both rural and urban post-1994 South Africa. In other words, each of these case studies encompasses (‘represents’) differing but crucial historical, geographical and socio-political characteristics of the post-1994 period within a larger tableau of ongoing socio-political contestation and class (read: economic) conflict.
Taken together, these stories can therefore provide a critical counter-narrative to that of the dominant media (and oftentimes to that of government as well). They can also assist with revealing the ways in which the developmental experiences of the specific community, and the struggles in which it has engaged, have been shaped by the (macro) post-1994 political economy of South Africa, inclusive of the dominant media terrain. And further, they can go some way to help explain and understand the exigencies of power and inequality that have characterised South Africa’s broader democratic journey.
STORIES FROM THREE COMMUNITIES
In the following three chapters, we present stories from the communities of Glebelands, Xolobeni/Amadiba and Thembelihle as they were related to us by the people who live there. From the very beginning, we had to acknowledge our own role in ‘remaking’ these stories as they would eventually appear here in this book, where we have essentially acted as intermediaries for making meaning. This role of acting as an intermediary is one that is shared by social science researchers and journalists alike when we behave as the conduits for carrying meaning and messages from the ground to published content. The nuance, however, comes in how this work of intermediation is performed. What choices does the intermediate make, and what principle of intermediation is followed?
On a purely practical level, we knew we had to find a way to ‘retell’ the many narratives related to us in a manner that would give prominence to these voice(s) themselves, while also working as a coherent and easy-to-follow reportage of an incredibly complex set of interrelated narratives. As much as it is important to allow lateral space for people to practise voice and to relate their own stories, it is equally crucial for such voice(s) to be ‘packaged’ in such a way as to be easily understandable to the reader. The role of the intermediary here is tricky and imbued with heavy responsibility: ‘tricky’ because narrative material must be translated in its form (though not its content) to function as an easily accessible text, while remaining cognisant of a responsibility to the people whose voices are informing that text, and to retell their stories with respect, dignity and truth.
For us, it would have made little sense to simply provide hundreds of pages of interview transcripts from 22 different interviews across three separate communities, quoted here verbatim. While this would have been the most accurate reflection of all things that were said, it would not have accomplished a satisfactory retelling of voice(s) in terms of readability. Instead, we decided to arrange the different aspects of the narratives given to us thematically, extract corresponding parts of the interviews and then organise and integrate excerpts into the larger body of text that seeks to ‘tell’ the respective stories and enable the inclusion of associated voice(s). To fulfil this task, the stories of each community are ‘told’ by breaking them down into eight distinct focal areas or topics.
The eight focal areas we selected for use are particular to this project. They were selected for their relevance to the specific social, political and environmental contexts of the three communities. Suffice to say that other researchers and/or journalists following a similar model of listening may develop alternative or additional focal areas or topics specific to the contexts of the communities or peoples with whose voice(s) they engage. But we believe that the fundamental principles of this approach would remain the same, that is, that every voice has a value, that each voice is distinct, that voice is an ongoing process and that voice is socially grounded, being situated within a particular historical context. Below, each of the focal areas that we selected to employ is set out with a brief explanation and motivation.
One: The personal side
Rarely do the dominant media offer much more than, at best, a cursory glance at the personal lives and experiences of activists and residents in poor communities. Including these is essential because it humanises the individual, the associated events or struggles as well as the community itself and creates a bridge between the reader and the community/ residents to better locate and understand the subject matter and those involved.
Two: History and context of the area
It is crucially important to cover the overall frame of conditions of life, socio-political conflict as well as the organisations and/or individuals involved (whether internal or external). Without this, one’s view and understanding will have no historical background, no contextual foundation and no means of assessing and/or determining facts, interpretations and explanations of the hows and whys of what has happened. If we recognise voice as a socially grounded process, then voice(s) can only be properly understood by placing it within the associated history and context.
Three: Community organisation
While this varies widely according to the community, it is vital to provide a clear sense of the reasons behind the formation of the organisation or collective, its relationships (internal and external), core purpose and overall trajectory, as well as the main experiences in struggle. Doing so also allows for the surfacing of any divisions within the community and how this plays out and is understood.
Four: Role of the state
This applies both proactively and reactively and allows for particular attention to be given to the state’s approach to and activity around community protest and voice, as well as official or legal spaces, combined with avenues and institutions for community participation and redress. Where applicable, this also provides an opportunity to include the role and activities of traditional authorities.
Five: Role of political parties
Political parties are most often at the heart of community politics and conflict, more particularly through local councillors, as well as through influence over key local state and governance structures and institutions. As such, their role and activity is central to shaping the character and content of community life and struggle.
Six: Role of law enforcement and the courts
Given the conflictual nature of community stories being ‘told’, it is important to surface the continuities and contradictions of related actions or reactions, complaints for redress, justice and accountability, as well as any measures taken to address these, both immediately and over time.
Seven: The dominant and other media
Rarely are the opinions and experiences that poor people have of the dominant media ever surfaced with any kind of depth and detail. Not only does this allow for a more grounded appraisal and critique but, it also provides space for surfacing the specifics of how the dominant media’s coverage and portrayal can and does impact on how the broader public see the community, its struggles and its residents.
Eight: What the future holds
These questions give air to the broader socio-political and more specific practically oriented views of those whose voice(s) are most ignored and marginalised. Besides that though, the responses here can provide a firm basis upon which to show how the dominant media largely sidelines the positive side of community stories as well as individual and collective endurance, sacrifices and emotions, which would allow for more human and universalist connections.
We developed the eight categories above, with regard to the specific and contextual struggles experienced by each of the three communities, but also according to the principles of voice(s) outlined in chapter 1. These include the principle that voice is not static but is rather an ongoing process: narratives can change and develop over time. Voice is socially grounded, and as such can only be properly understood by placing it within its associated historical and political context. Each voice is distinct because each narrator is different, and each narrative is related to an interweaving set of related stories. There is never only one voice speaking to any particular set of events or issue, but a multiplicity of voices: the task for us as researchers and journalists is to seek out this multiplicity instead of hearing only the ‘loudest’ voice. Above all, we operated according to the fundamental principle that all voice(s) and every voice has value.