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The Importance of Voice and the Myth of the ‘Voiceless’
Julie Reid
Voice as a process – giving account of oneself and what affects one’s life – is an irreducible part of what it means to be human; effective voice (the effective opportunity to have one’s voice heard and taken into account) is a human good.
— Nick Couldry, Why Voice Matters
As social animals, all human beings instinctively and naturally yearn to give an account of themselves and to tell their own stories. But, to operate as if certain peoples lack this desire or ability is to behave towards them as if they are not human (Couldry 2010). In recent years, philosophers and social scientists have pondered the notion of ‘voice’ as a type of catch-all phrase that infers more than the literal meaning of the word, that is, the sounds and words one makes when speaking. Jim Macnamara (2012) conceptualises ‘voice’ as more than the verbal act of speaking since it includes human communication of all types, such as voting, protesting, online participation and artistic production. More broadly, voice, or rather the ability to practise voice, relies on inclusion and participation in political, economic and social expression and processes, and involves affording people the space to actively contribute to decisions that affect their lives. Jo Tacchi (2008: 1) calls the denial of the right of peoples to participate in such activity, ‘voice poverty’.
Voice today is theoretically understood to encompass a broad spectrum of communicative activity, which includes: iterating one’s view, story and position in the world; having that story or position listened to by others; having one’s story recognised as something that matters; and, further, having it mediated or carried via a means of communication (such as the news media) to the broader collective or society. Admittedly, that is putting things rather simply because there are complex and multilayered problems and conditions relevant to each one of these steps. A number of writers examine the intricacies of this process, the notion of ‘voice’, its definition, its theorisation, its associated processes and, crucially, the characteristic challenges prevalent in the disablement of the effective practice of voice. Particularly notable among these is work done by Susan Bickford (1996), the research collective called the Listening Project (O’Donnell, Lloyd and Dreher 2009) and Nick Couldry (2009, 2010). Bickford (1996) offers a landmark and detailed examination of voice and associated listening in her book, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship, in which she explores ‘pathbuilding’ communicative practices. Here, citizens engage with one another’s perspectives through an ongoing process of speaking and listening, though not necessarily with the goal of social coherence. Instead, the discord, which naturally arises during these interactions, encourages participants to re-evaluate their own speaking practices (Bickford 1996).
Charles Husband (1996, 2008) amplifies the ethical importance of listening by advocating the ‘right to be understood’ as a fundamental communication right. Lisbeth Lipari (2010) proposes a paradigm shift that places listening at the centre of communication rather than speaking, and she defines a perspective on listening, which she calls ‘listening being’. While the largest body of literature emphasises the notion of listening as central to communication, Couldry (2009, 2010) focuses the critical lens on voice. We take particular direction from his explication of the various characteristics of ‘voice’. However, while he identifies a number of different levels of voice, we will mention only those that are relevant here in relation to how voice is either carried out or ignored by the dominant news media, and what the implications are for journalism.
While the body of scholarly literature on communicative voice and listening, and the associated ethics involved, is steadily growing, we do not offer a detailed literature review of such writings here because this has already been presented at length elsewhere (see, for example, Dreher 2009, 2017; Macnamara 2012; O’Donnell 2009; O’Donnell, Lloyd and Dreher 2009). Rather, what we offer in this book is a demonstration of such theory in practice: we intend this as an example of active listening, with the purpose of surfacing and amplifying voice as a means to illustrate how this could be translated into journalistic practice for application in the news media.
In this book, we have kept the theoretical side of things unapologetically simple. This is because, with respect to our scholarly peers, we do not want the journalists, future journalists-in-training, newsmakers and editors who read this book to become discouraged by complexities and near-unfathomable musings so characteristic of academic writing (Heleta 2016). Rather, we adopt the principled position of offering a text that is easy to read, easy to understand and more broadly accessible, knowing that this approach offers greater potential to catalyse the type of change that we advocate in this book. We aim to provide research that is accessible to working journalists, as a practical demonstration for how to enable voice through listening and, in doing so, do good journalism. We also want this project to speak to ordinary citizens who may aspire to talk and be heard, and whom much of this book is about, as a testament that they have every right to demand a news media that listens to them and takes their stories seriously.
Since the ordinary grassroots citizen is at the heart of this project, the notion of voice as the initial act of speaking and telling one’s own story is our primary point of departure. The concept of voice is, however, for us and for many other theorists, inextricably linked to the act of listening. The two, voice and listening, are coupled: the accompaniment of listening, together with speaking, are two parts of the same equation where neither can be determined as entirely successful without the other (Dreher 2009).
The first and most crucial aspect is to acknowledge that everyone has a voice, and no one is voiceless. The voicelessness of the ‘voiceless’ is an unfortunate myth. Jan Servaes and Patchanee Malikhao (2005), for example, attest that people are ‘voiceless’ not because they have nothing to say, but because nobody cares to listen to them. People, all people, regardless of their personal status, class, wealth, education, gender, race or ethnicity, have something to say and have stories to tell, if only we could bear to listen. This means that simply having a voice is not enough. In addition, one needs to know that one’s voice matters, that it is considered and that it is heard.
So, having a voice relies on the prerequisite of having that voice matter, to be heard and listened to by others. Active and considered listening registers and respects the distinctness and importance of the narrative of the speaker, without which voice will not succeed in being heard (Couldry 2010).
To tell one’s own story is a considered decision. It requires reflection on how to speak, which part or parts of the story to tell, and what to say. Equally, listeners ought to practise critical introspection on how they listen, on what they (choose to) hear, which parts of the story they pay attention to, and which parts they ignore. This means taking an active responsibility for whom, how and what we listen to (Bickford 1996). Of course, societal and normative hierarchies often determine the trajectory of our listening, meaning that we regard some voices as more worthy of being listened to than others (more on this later). But where voice and listening are co-dependent, and if we accept that to deny the effective practice of voice to some (by not listening to them) constitutes oppression and injustice, we must also recognise that reconfiguring listening practice can potentially break up normative traditions and hierarchies, allowing greater space for a plurality of voices (Bickford 1996).
This equation of effective voice (speaking plus engaged listening) is central to the legitimacy of modern democracies. Yet, somehow, the organisation of the human sphere of communication has naturalised and made acceptable the importance of some voices over others to the extent that alternate voices do not matter (Couldry 2010). Men’s voices have always mattered more than women’s, so much so that this seems ‘natural’. Heteronormative narratives dominate our popular culture, while homosexually aligned ones are relegated to the fringe or the obscure, and again we are duped into accepting this as ‘natural’, when in reality there is nothing strange or unnatural about being gay. Elite, middle-class and economically secure voices have always been mediated in abundance, relative to the voices of the poor and working classes.
Importantly, when some segments of society experience a lack of voice, when these are not listened to or heard, societal, political and cultural fissures and/or inequalities naturally arise. Denying voice to some has a material impact. Simply put, when everyone has a voice it is better for society. For example, feminism has long identified the lack of effective voice available to women as a determining factor regarding their social and economic status and inequity, as well as the related negatively connoted identity that is experienced by women in every part of the world (Macnamara 2012). The material impact of women’s lack of voice is clearly evident, measureable and undeniable.
For instance, the 2019 Sustainable Development Goals Index surveyed 129 countries in terms of their progress in meeting the 2030 targets for gender equality. Not a single country in the world was found to be on track to meet these internationally agreed targets, while 2.8 billion women live in countries that are doing too little or nothing to empower women and end inequality. Women the world over still suffer diminished power and under-representation in governmental bodies, including parliaments, in upper management positions in both the private and public sector, and in the economy, while women are still unaccountably, though predominantly, paid less than men for doing the same work (Ford 2019). When half of the world’s routinely marginalised voices bear direct symmetry with the same half of the world’s people who are clearly afforded less social, economic and political power than the other half, the importance of effective voice as a key factor for the overall health of society becomes obvious.
And so, firstly, a considered view of voice starts with the acknowledgement that voice, every voice, has value. More forcefully, for societal health and in the interest of justice and equality, every voice must have value. It is important to not only value voice itself, but to also value the societal frameworks, institutions, platforms and resources that themselves value voice, and consciously identify, reject and reform those that do not (Couldry 2010). With regard to such societal frameworks and institutions, the media sphere is not innocent as it routinely maintains what Tanja Dreher (2009: 445) refers to as the ‘hierarchies of language which can be slow to shift’. The task then ‘is to take responsibility for shifting those hierarchies of attention which produce unequal opportunities for speaking and being heard. And it is “a particular kind of listening” which might serve to undo these entrenched hierarchies of voice’ (Dreher 2009: 446).
Secondly, voice needs to be understood as a process, and not as a once-off isolated occurrence. Giving an account of one’s life, events or conditions, telling a story or enacting the natural human activity of relating a narrative is only the first aspect of voice. Much more needs to stem from this in order for voice to be recognised, valued and effective.
For example, voice is socially grounded, meaning that it is not the isolated practice of individuals. No one narrative can be separated from an interlocking set of related narratives, which is why it is crucial to always present a particular voice in its associated context and history – something that dominant journalism often fails to do, as is evident in the following chapters (Couldry 2010).
Couldry (2010: 8) calls voice ‘an embodied process’ that is informed by history, and because each voice is iterated from a ‘distinctive embodied position’ it follows that the trajectory of each voice is distinct. Simply, we all have different things to say because we are all different. Therefore, when we fail to acknowledge and respect the inevitable differences between voices, we fail to recognise voice itself. In reality, of course, there is no one voice (singular), but a multiplicity of voices (plural). It follows then that we ought to be deeply suspicious when an institution, whose responsibility is to inform us of the events of the world, reports these from a singular (dominant) position.
Clearly, the overarching concept of voice described above involves a great many things. But, from this point on in this book, we will narrow our use of the term ‘voice(s)’ to a more specific connotation. That is not to exclude the importance of the concept and the process as a whole, but we do this here for simplicity and brevity. We include the bracketed ‘(s)’ on the end of the term to invoke the possibility of the plural and to indicate a recognition that there is always more than one solitary voice related to any particular situation, story and context. For the purposes of the remainder of this book, voice(s) points to the narratives and stories of the people this book is about – the members of grassroots communities, who, all of them, have important stories to tell, whose experiences of events have implications for a broader society, country and political landscape, but whose version of events and experiences have been habitually ignored and/or misrepresented by the dominant news media.
In this book, we often refer to what we have termed the ‘dominant media’ for the purposes of our discussion. So what/who do we mean by the dominant media? For us, the dominant media ought to be understood less in terms of the formal structures of media ownership, but more in respect of the direction of the national narrative. That is, the myriad collection of media reports, journalists, editors, articles, broadcasts and media outlets, which collectively direct the trajectory of public discourse on any particular issue towards the same or a similar cohesive understanding of events. In overly simple terms, it is the various news media outlets and reports that all sing to the same tune, and which report on the same events in the same ways. The dominant media is then comprised of media outlets that may fall within the stable of privately owned, corporatised media conglomerates or public service media institutions, but which all behave in accordance with the dominant narrative.
We have selected the term ‘dominant’ to remain in keeping with Stuart Hall’s (1980) outstanding and still relevant explanation of how perspectives (readings) can vary – the ‘dominant’ one, however, primarily orientated toward the status quo. But as much as our different perspectives and readings of events can vary, so too can our retelling of them. This book is about how there are stories, many stories, to be told about any particular scene or situation. And about how the dominant media regularly ignores most of them, in favour of telling only one story.
Importantly, the dominant media maintains the facade of professional journalism in pursuit of truth and in adherence with the highest order of media ethics. The dominant media must mythologise the profession in this way in order to ensure its own credibility. The remainder of this book, however, exposes this facade for what it is – a myth. Roland Barthes ([1957] 1972) formulates a semiotic model for the function of communicated myth, which acts as a mode of speech that is ideologically infused, but which can often operate so unobtrusively that the message is simply accepted as fact, as natural, as entirely justifiable and as the way things are. Simply, a myth is a mode of communicating an idea, the motivations of which are concealed, and the content of which is largely inaccurate, but which dupes people into believing it anyway.
In this book we have focused on three politically, socially and economically marginalised communities involved in differing struggles for social justice: these are the communities of Glebelands, Xolobeni/Amadiba and Thembelihle in South Africa. But many other marginalised groups or communities have suffered a similar non-recognition of their own voice(s) by the dominant media. We mention this here, and highlight the findings of related research studies, conducted independently of our own, to demonstrate how this media behaviour is not unique or isolated to the stories of Glebelands, Xolobeni/Amadiba and Thembelihle.
WHAT DO WE ALREADY KNOW ABOUT THE NEWS MEDIA AND VOICE(S)?
A number of other recent research studies confirm the critique that we deliver here, that the dominant media does not offer adequate voice(s) and representation to the majority of citizens, who in South Africa predominantly are the poor. For example, a 2013 study (Malila 2013), which focused on the youth as media consumers, explored the relationships between young research participants and the media. The study highlights that young, poor, black South Africans feel mostly disconnected from the majority of news media content. Participants expressed the concern that they do not ‘see’ themselves in the news media, the content of which holds little relevance to their concerns, interests and lives. While South African society is bottom heavy and comprised of a large youth segment, little media content concerns the interests of the youth.
According to Jane Duncan (2013b): ‘With the exception of education, youth input on issues of importance was minimal, with practically no youth input on crime. Young men were more prominent in the coverage than young women.’ With close to 1000 young people surveyed in four provinces, these young people remarked on the dearth of in-depth reporting that was relevant to them. The media’s failure to engage and listen to youth voice(s), and to act as an enabler for young peoples’ developing civic and political identities, is striking.
In another example, in 2014, Vanessa Malila presented the findings of a news content analysis study. It revealed how the news media routinely fails to enable young persons to act as informed and engaged citizens due to neglect of representing content regarding public discourses that impact the youth. Focusing on education, the study emphasises that the news media habitually fails to provide relevant information that could be of importance to the youth in respect of education coverage. Furthermore, news reporting on education does not feature the voices, opinions or perspectives of young people – the self-same people who ought to be at the centre of the story. That young, poor, black South Africans do not recognise themselves, their interests or their communities in the dominant media, that they are not consulted, heard or listened to as a means of informing the news reporting that is directly relevant to them, is testament to the lack of engagement between the media and the majority of South Africans. The year following the publication of Malila’s study saw the advent of the #FeesMustFall student-led protest movement across South Africa. While the main impetus of this movement was aimed at transforming the higher education environment, the veracity and widespread enthusiasm that characterised youth involvement in #FeesMustFall bore testament to a broad youth frustration at their lack of collective voice. Here, mass protest became the only means by which the youth were able to have their voice(s) heard or taken seriously by the establishment.
Let us shift focus for a minute, from the youth to another under-represented, marginalised and stereotyped segment of society, and one that comprises just over half of all people alive in the world: women. A 2013 report conducted by the media monitoring company, Media Tenor, found that women’s voices are routinely under-represented in the news media, and on television women accounted for only 14 per cent of coverage in South Africa (Duncan 2013b). This problem is not only endemic to South Africa, but in most regions of the world.
In 2014 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released its report, ‘World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development’, which highlighted the global extent of the matter. Women constitute less than a quarter (24 per cent) of the persons heard or represented in traditional news media, but, even worse, women comprise only a fifth of authoritative news voices quoted in the news (20 per cent of experts and 19 per cent as spokespersons). News outlets looking for expert comment or interviewees on matters of societal, legal, political or economic importance will consult a man about 81 per cent of the time (UNESCO 2014). Women working in the media sector, who are best placed to increase the gendered diversity of news media reporting, are often shifted to ‘soft news’ beats, relegated to covering topics traditionally considered to be more feminine, such as celebrity gossip or fashion news, while their male colleagues report on the important stuff, such as politics and the economy.
In 2018, I was asked to assist with the editorial work on the more recent 2018 edition of the UNESCO World Trends report. While studying the findings compiled for each of the six world regions, I discovered how the position of women in the media sector and their levels of representation had not only stagnated rather than improved since 2014, but in some regions and contexts had actually regressed (UNESCO 2018).
I was later asked to attend the UNESCO World Press Freedom Day Conference held in Accra, Ghana, and speak to the contents of the 2018 report. While the UNESCO report covers a range of topics, including media freedom, independence, diversity and the safety of journalists around the world, it was the stagnation and in some places the regression of women’s positions in the media that most startled me. Here we are, talking about approximately 52 per cent of all peoples, in the twenty-first century, and after decades-long myriad efforts by global, multilateral and non-governmental organisations to curb the under-representation of women in the news, as well as support the promotion of women media workers, but all the while very little appears to have changed. Women journalists are still predominantly paid less than men. Only one in four media decision-makers are women, one in five experts interviewed are women, and one in three reporters are women – and these will likely not be assigned to ‘hard news’ coverage (UNESCO 2018). On this, I said:
Women’s potential for the advancement of media diversity and pluralism is more nuanced and multi-layered than simply promoting more women to senior management level within media organisations. The broader representation of women, by women, stands to not only increase media profits (by behaving more inclusively toward more of the audience) but improve the overall health of the media ecology and markets. Women do not write about the world in the same way as men, but that does not mean that the only things that they have something to say about are lifestyle issues like fashion or celebrity gossip. Women think, feel, know, give-a-damn, and write, about things like politics, corruption, war, and the law just as well as men do – albeit and thankfully, quite differently from them (Reid 2018b).
Some of the members of the audience smiled. Most of the audience, and especially the women present, clapped. The collection of men in the audience, who visibly frowned, grunted with disapproval and/or shook their heads, did not escape my notice.
It would be easy to assume that these global figures are skewed mostly by the inclusion of numbers from media systems that operate in countries that are undemocratic or authoritarian regimes. But, the statistics for women’s inclusion in the media is only a few percentage points higher in most so-called democratic countries. A stark reminder that we still have a long way to go in encouraging the naturalisation and societal acceptance of a broader representation of women’s voice(s) in the dominant media surfaced recently in the United Kingdom. On 3 September 2018, the BBC broadcast the first episode of its new lunchtime political discussion programme, Politics Live. The show is anchored by a woman, Jo Coburn. The panel was comprised of two members of parliament, the BBC’s political editor, The Guardian’s joint political editor and a journalist from the Daily Telegraph. That is an admirable collection of persons for a panel, the purpose of which is to discuss politics. As luck would have it, all of the invited panellists for that day also happened to be women.
The social media backlash from men was immediate. Male social media users accused the panel of being a stunt, saying that the show was gimmicky, too politically correct and compared it to a UK daytime celebrity news and lifestyle talk show called Loose Women. The Politics Live editor, Rob Burley, publically defended the fact that the panel featured five women in a manner he would have undoubtedly not had to do if it had featured five men (Lyons 2018). Still, even today, dominant societal discourses are so deeply imbued with the patriarchal naturalisation of male voice that a mere instance of the representation of women’s voice(s) is considered offensive.
Another often misrepresented collection of voice(s) is public protestors. A study conducted by academics at the University of Cape Town (Wasserman, Bosch and Chuma 2018) examined the media’s coverage of community protest action in South Africa, and explored the views of the activists involved in arranging the protests.
Tellingly, the 2018 study found that while journalists ‘approached the protests from the conventional “news values” perspective which they considered natural, activists felt that the mainstream media somehow short-changed them and their causes by either misrepresenting them or highlighting the voices of authorities and other “official” sources while at the same time marginalising ordinary citizens’ voices’ (Wasserman, Bosch and Chuma 2018: 379).
In the case of South African activists, the overwhelming sentiment was that while the media played an important role in covering the protests and keeping them on the public agenda, the manner of coverage was ‘top-down’ in that it privileged elite voices and frames of reference while marginalising the ordinary citizens on the ground. While some activists viewed the media as an essential part of modern politics, others said that the media did not speak to the audiences they were trying to reach, so in these instances, it was considered marginal (Wasserman, Bosch and Chuma 2018: 380).
Perhaps the most iconic example of the dominant media’s misrepresentation of the stories of the poor in post-1994 South Africa surfaced with the reportage of the Marikana massacre. On 12 August 2012, a large group of miners, who had been striking for a period of six days, gathered together to protest their low wages on an open patch of arid land close to the Lonmin mine near the town of Rustenburg. After a tense stand-off between the miners and the police, the miners began to disperse. At that moment, the South African Police Service (SAPS) opened fire on the dispersing protestors, shooting 112 of them, wounding 78 and killing 34. What made the massacre more appalling was that this was not a simple case of spontaneous panic on the part of the police officers present. Initial news media reports gave a shocked South African public the impression that the police had opened fire in panic, perhaps because they believed that their own lives were in danger from a group of slowly approaching miners, and, by the time a ceasefire had been called and obeyed, 112 protestors had unfortunately been shot. The official SAPS version of events maintained that the police officers on the scene acted in self-defence.
But this is not what really happened. What really happened is much more horrifying. The first volley of gunfire, and the only shooting incident initially reported in the news, downed only a small group of miners. The remainder of the 112 people shot were thereafter quite literally hunted down by SAPS officers as they tried to run away, many of them shot in the back. This second and brutal round of killings was not reported by the press.
It was an academic, It was an academic (not a journalist), Peter Alexander, who first alerted us to the full extent, nature and character of the police killings on that day. He and his team of researchers worked the scene, recorded evidence and collected eyewitness accounts (Alexander et al. 2012). Finally, almost a month after the massacre, an independent journalist, Greg Marinovich (2012), writing for the independent publication Daily Maverick, reported on the second killing sites where many people had been shot while trying to hide from the police, were trapped, and shot at close range. Until this point, the dominant news media, without exception and like well-behaved sheep, had dutifully reported the account provided by government and police spokespersons, which painted the massacre as an unfortunate accident. Marinovich’s article cracked that facade wide open.
The Marikana massacre subsequently initiated a period of scrutiny aimed at the news media’s poor performance (Reid 2012). Duncan (2012) performed a content analysis of 153 articles published in mainstream newspapers (Business Day, The Star, New Age, The Citizen, The Times, Sowetan, Beeld, Die Burger and Mail & Guardian) between 13 and 22 August 2012. In particular, Duncan analysed the sources consulted by journalists in the run-up to and the immediate aftermath of the massacre. She revealed that miners were used as sources for information in only 3 per cent of the news articles sampled. This is astonishing, since it was only the miners themselves who could provide first-hand eyewitness accounts to the police actions. Nonetheless, the majority of sources of information consulted by news outlets were business (27 per cent), mine management/owners (14 per cent), political parties (10 per cent), government (9 per cent) and the SAPS (5 per cent).
Duncan (2012) says:
Of the 3 percent of miners who were interviewed … only one worker was quoted speaking about what actually happened during the massacre, and he said the police shot first. Most miners were interviewed in relation to the stories alleging that the miners had used muti [traditional medicine] to defend themselves against the police’s bullets, as well as the miners’ working and living conditions. So in other words, of all 153 articles, only one showed any attempt by a journalist to obtain an account from a worker about their version of events. There is scant evidence of journalists having asked the miners the simplest and most basic of questions, namely ‘what happened’?
The findings of Duncan’s (2012) study highlight two central aspects in respect of the news media’s iteration of voice(s). Firstly, where the people who are most directly impacted by events are not consulted, crucial information is often missed, thus devaluing the accuracy of journalistic reporting. Rule number one: talk to the people who were actually there, even if they are poor. Secondly, and central to the practice of meaningful listening encompassing a respect for the dignity of voice(s), journalists not only need to interview the people concerned, but also actually listen to them. For journalists, talking to people on the ground should not amount to a mere tick-the-box exercise. Had journalists really listened to the scant few miners they did interview in the wake of the Marikana massacre, they would have heard detailed narratives that would have provided them with more information about events than simply the types of muti used as protection from bullets.
Of course, this lack of listening is not a characteristic that is unique to the South African dominant media, but occurs all over the world. On this, Penny O’Donnell (2009: 505) states the following: ‘There is no doubt that Journalism 1.0 has a poor track record in reporting experiences of social marginalisation; the social groups most commonly absent or spoken for by the media include poor women, Indigenous people, migrants who do not speak the official common language, and young people.’
MOTIVATION FOR THIS BOOK
So, why did we write this book? As mentioned, many recent research projects provide evidence of the news media’s habitual misrepresentation or non-representation of the voice(s) belonging to the largest segment of the country’s population, the marginalised and poor. Conversely, the news media is disproportionately dominated by narratives that serve the interests of, speak to and speak about the small segments of the population that retain political, social and economic power (see, for example, Berger 2003; Duncan 2012; Friedman 2011; Garman and Malila 2017; Malila 2013, 2014; Malila and Garman 2016; Reid 2012; Wasserman 2013, 2017; Wasserman, Chuma and Bosch 2016).
The amount of literature providing evidence-based research that presents the earlier or similar findings is steadily growing. The dominant news media does a poor job of reporting grassroots and ordinary citizens’ voice(s), and researchers have proved it. However, the majority of research projects that tackle this problem do not do two important but crucial things. The first of these is that the researchers who critique the news media’s lack of engagement with voice(s) do not do precisely what they insist journalists ought to do. That is, researchers most often do not engage with the very people for whom they claim to speak. The largest body of research literature here relies on various types of media content analysis as a measure to demonstrate the lack of adequately represented voice(s) in news reportage. However, apart from a select few exceptions, most researchers do not themselves engage with or listen to the persons whom they claim the media misrepresents. Recent exceptions to this include Duncan (2016), Malila (2017) and Wasserman, Bosch and Chuma (2018).
Secondly, most of the literature on the news media’s behaviour towards voice(s) provides critique only but does not attempt to provide alternative ways of doing things, nor suggest practical ways in which to change the way we make news. Critique is important. But it is also important to follow through with explorations of how things can be done differently, to change things for the better.
This book attempts to fill both of the gaps highlighted above. First, we set out to actively participate in a thorough process of listening, with a deep respect for the dignity of voice(s). We did this because we do not believe that we can encourage journalists to do so if we are not committed to doing so ourselves. We also did this as a means of demonstration. Quite simply, we wanted to show that it can be done. Secondly, we did not write this book only to complain about the news media’s behaviour, but also to offer suggested recommendations for how to encourage a more participative practice of listening among journalists, in the interest of democratising the media sphere. Only once we understand the machinations of dominant media behaviour and how these negatively impact the inclusion of voice(s), can we begin to explore alternative methods to traditional, dominant news production.
METHODOLOGY AND SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS
The methodology for this book involved various avenues, focusing primarily on a set of in-depth interviews, a large-scale media content analysis and a survey of relevant related research. The book presents three case studies/stories, which capture a representational cross-section of struggle narratives from poor communities in both rural and urban post-1994 South Africa. Each of these case studies encompasses differing but crucial historical, geographical and socio-political ‘characteristics’ of the post-1994 period.
Those characteristics include, but are not wholly limited to, issues of:
•land – its ownership/distribution, usage and associated relations of production;
•basic services (such as water, electricity, education, health care, housing) – availability, affordability and provision;
•social and productive relationships with/involving the state and the private sector, inclusive of corruption and undemocratic practice;
•the levels, content and history of political and social activism – both in respect of organisations and collectives established in communities and active in various struggles and vis-à-vis the dominant broader political trends and party politics; and
•geographical location and ethnographic make-up.
Underlying all of these is the larger issue of the ways in which the developmental experiences of each specific community and the struggles in which it has engaged have been shaped by the dominant (macro) post-1994 political economy of South Africa, inclusive of the news media terrain.
Glebelands is the largest hostel community in South Africa, situated in Umlazi, South Durban. Over the last decade, in particular, Glebelands has experienced intense and violent struggles (including over 160 murders or assassinations since April 2014) centred on political and ethnic mobilisation, control of accommodation, and police and political party/state complicity in violence and corruption.
The Amadiba region encompasses several rural villages along the Wild Coast region of the Eastern Cape Province. The Amadiba community has been involved in lengthy struggles centred on the issuing of mining rights on their land as well as associated road construction. These have involved all levels of the state as well as private mining corporations. The Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC), a community-based organisation, has for many years been at the forefront of opposing the proposed dune mining in the Xolobeni area. In March 2016, the chairperson of the ACC, Sikhosiphi ‘Bazooka’ Radebe, was assassinated.
Thembelihle is an urban, semi-informal community situated in the Johannesburg Metro, near Soweto. Thembelihle has a long history of social justice struggle centred on housing, forced relocation, urban development, political party contestation and the right to protest. Members of this community have routinely been subjected to acute police brutality, and have been arrested and wrongfully detained, while community leaders and organisers have been personally targeted by security services, having their homes raided by the police, their families and children intimidated and some have been forced into hiding.
In doing the research for this book, we engaged with relevant organisations and activists who both work with and live in each of the communities. This was followed by setting up a range of in-depth interviews in each community. We made physical visits to the communities to conduct the interviews and in order to get the real, full, detailed and bottom-up versions of the respective stories.
A full-scale media content analysis was conducted in order to determine how the stories relevant to each of these three communities were represented by the dominant media, as well as how these stories have been communicated by the relevant centres of power, including government. Through collating a range of research materials, as well as interview transcripts, and then through critical analysis, the book places these all within the macro socio-economic and political context of South Africa since 1994. This then allows a demonstration of how the accumulated evidence exposes the gap between the actual/real stories of these communities and those told by the dominant media, and, in the process, exposes the mistruths, myths and self-interested motivation behind the dominant discourse and thought frame that characterises the storytelling of the dominant news media.
We followed a similar methodology of combining a media content analysis coupled with in-depth interviews to Duncan’s 2016 study, when she investigated the news media’s reportage of protests and protestors in the regions of Rustenburg, Mbombela, Blue Crane Route (focusing specifically on Cookhouse) and the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro. ‘These were the sites where in-depth interviews were conducted … so the narratives of the protestors could be compared and contrasted with the main narratives in the news articles’ (Duncan 2016: 150). While Duncan was dealing specifically with the representation of protest and protestors, and we set out to investigate the stories not necessarily of protestors, but of particular communities involved in struggles with high news value, the methodology adopted by Duncan nonetheless proved instructive. Perhaps not surprisingly, however, the character of Duncan’s (2016) findings was similar to ours regarding the manner in which the dominant media routinely applied negative and stereotypical frames to the stories of the poor, as opposed to the markedly different stories told by the people themselves.
In short, this book aims to provide a long-overdue opportunity for these groups of marginalised and downtrodden peoples to practise voice, to tell their stories as they have lived and experienced them during the post-apartheid period, and for those stories to be inserted into the overall public sphere of national debate.
Chapter 2 describes the manner in which we approached the interview process. Knowing that we wished to surface a multiplicity of voice(s) from the three communities of Glebelands, Xolobeni and Thembelihle, we initially needed to rethink and interrogate our own strategies of listening. This chapter also contextualises the social and economic landscape of post-1994 South Africa, and presents the architecture of how we constructed the retelling of the collected narratives of the three communities.
Chapters 3, 4 and 5 form the heart of the book. Here, the stories of the three selected communities are first briefly contextualised within the larger developmental and political economy of contemporary South Africa. This allowed us to better appreciate both the political and socio-economic location and the importance of these stories. The remainder of each chapter focuses on surfacing voices from each of the three communities. Each community sub-section begins with a concise history/biography of the community, followed by excerpts taken from the interviews conducted, which are organised according to various topics that are relevant to the community context and associated stories.
In chapter 6, the focus is turned towards the dominant media, whose character and content (when it comes to covering the marginalised and the poor) is revealed as being in core service to a profit-driven model and elitist narrative. To empirically back up this argument, the chapter proceeds to provide a succinct cross-section analysis covering all three communities, including examples selected from a comprehensive post-1994 sampling of print articles and audio-visual clips from numerous media outlets that constitute the dominant media in South Africa. In doing so, the analysis serves two reinforcing purposes: to reveal key differences, contradictions, omissions and indeed completely opposite ‘tellings’ between the stories told by the residents and those contained in the dominant media; and to subject the storytelling of the dominant media to both objective and subjective critique.
Chapter 7 provides a framing of South Africa’s post-1994 macro socio-economic and political realities of unequal relations of class, racial and gender position and power, which produce societal dominance in various ways. It is within this macro framing that the presence, content and character, as well as practical role, of South Africa’s dominant media can be properly conceptualised and understood. This is done by offering a double-sided analysis-argument of the dialectic of this dominance, backed up by the use of selected parts of the stories told by community members, as well as examples taken from media articles. On the one hand, it shows the ways in which dominant narratives have rooted and shaped the developmental experiences and life possibilities of the targeted communities and their struggles. On the other hand, it reveals the ways in which the dominant media has foundationally constructed a dominant thought frame and discourse that has enabled, reflected and moulded a dominant way of seeing and thinking about poor communities and their struggles and thus also of how their related stories are told.
We then turn our attention in chapters 8, 9 and 10 to how this media behaviour can and ought to be changed, as well as the benefits of doing so. Chapter 8 addresses the double-edged predicament faced by much of the world’s dominant news media presently, that is, the crisis of credibility and a crisis of financial sustainability. The chapter investigates how these could both be alleviated through increased levels of media content diversity, with an emphasis on the inclusion of marginalised voice(s).
In chapter 9, we discuss how critical debates on news media behaviour have regularly been scuppered by illogical arguments that equate legitimate critique with intolerable ‘attacks’ on the freedom of the press. This mythologisation of the journalistic profession, which places it beyond reproach and is framed in catchphrases like ‘journalism is not a crime’, often act as a hindrance to constructive debates on how the news media could perform better. Indeed, critique is also not a crime. The chapter argues for a redefinition of the popular understanding of media freedom to one that includes a concern for audience-centred freedoms, and, by implication, a re-evaluation of related concepts within the spectrum of journalistic ethics, as well as a revamp of media accountability mechanisms.
Chapter 10 makes case for ‘listening journalism’, which is an already well-established concept in media and communications theory, but which has been largely ignored in practice, both by media critics, academics and researchers and by the news media industry. The in-depth investigation and reportage on each of the three selected communities presented in this book serves as an example of listening journalism/research in practice, as it could be applied more broadly by the press, and as an example of how to retell stories from the ground in a way that does not further marginalise poor communities but gives them a legitimate voice in the public sphere. Lastly, the chapter addresses the need to encourage a realignment of the paradigms governing the journalistic profession, the manner in which journalists are taught and trained within the higher education environment, and offers a set of practical guidelines for working journalists wishing to engage in meaningful listening journalism.
THE AUDIENCE-CENTRED APPROACH
The research performed for this book was commissioned by the Media Policy and Democracy Project (MPDP) and funded by the Open Society Foundation for South Africa and the Women in Research grant provided by the University of South Africa (UNISA). The MPDP was launched in 2012 and is a South African-based research collective, administrated jointly between the Department of Communication Science at UNISA and the Department of Journalism, Film and Television at the University of Johannesburg. It aims to promote participatory media and communications policymaking in the public interest.
Since its launch, the MPDP has collaborated with academics and researchers from various institutions throughout South Africa and the world. The MPDP has also collaborated with civil society organisations and social justice movements, which have a specific focus on media and communications policymaking, and which have a central concern for the public interest and a ground-up audience-based approach to research and policy interventions. Part of the work of the MPDP includes consultation with national media policymakers, including parliament, in order to inject media policymaking processes with informed, evidence-based research that holds a concern for the public interest at its core. The combined and collective efforts of MPDP researchers has contributed to policymaking involving media and internet freedom, public service broadcasting and digital terrestrial television, journalistic ethics and accountability systems, including press regulation, mass communications surveillance and privacy, as well as media diversity and transformation.
Central to this research collective is an untraditional mode of performing research developed by the MPDP, the audience-centred approach. In a manner that is dissimilar to Northern-developed research practices, the audience-centred approach regards the audience, the media end user, the ordinary person on the ground as primary and central to the research effort (Duncan and Reid 2013; Reid 2017a, 2018a). Each of our research efforts begins by taking the perspective of the audience/grassroots citizen as its point of departure. The audience-centred approach is not a research methodology; it is a research attitude. Our methodologies are multiple and vary because in each case they will depend entirely on the direction received from a particular ground-up departure point and the specificities of each contextual situation relative to the relationship this bears with the media or communications landscape.
For the most part, the trajectory of media policymaking is directed by those with the power and means to do so, whether they are media owners and stakeholders, corporate capital, elites in government or political circles or media regulators. As a ground-up approach to research and media policymaking, the audience-centred approach inverts the traditional top-down power axis, and operates according to the understanding that the media audience is the primary point of departure and ought to direct the progression of policymaking and research.
Clearly, the audience-centred approach can be comfortably situated within the broader context and discourse of decolonial approaches to scholarship, particularly within media studies. Our primary aim in this book is not to offer new theoretical contributions to the decolonial debate on scholarship and research, but rather to present a practical example of what such approaches may look like in practice. While the transformative trajectory of decolonial discourse on teaching, learning, training and research holds immeasurable value, much of this debate remains on a theoretical, general and somewhat abstract level. We attest that actively listening to what grassroots communities have to say, and taking their stories seriously, is one way in which to move beyond traditional Western epistemologies.
We adopt the audience-centred approach because firstly and as social scientists, we have a moral obligation to do so; and secondly, because the audience-centred approach centres its efforts on a respect for the dignity of voice(s); and thirdly, because it just makes sense: if we want to research the media, then surely the best place to start is with the peoples whom the media ought to exist for. And if not for the audience/media end users, then what or who is the media for? Further, and more acutely, without the audience/media end users, would the media even have a purpose? Simply, the media exits because of the audience. How then can we operate if the audience and its voice(s) are anything but central?
