Fire and media: Towards a new South African journalism

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The Ruth First Fellowship brings together academic research and social activism in the tradition of the pioneering journalist-activist the Fellowship honours. The Fellowship seeks research and critical thinking that will inform activism, and activists who will bring their experience to enrich the world of research. It also favours younger, emerging voices that will benefit from the exposure. Work is presented as part of the annual Ruth First Memorial Lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand. Welcoming critical investigations of social dynamics in Africa, grounded in relevant, illustrative, qualitative, evidentiary approaches, African Studies provides support and partnership for the Fellowship, which is hosted by the journalism department of the University of the Witwatersrand. The journal encourages innovative contributions from established and new scholars that reflect current conceptual thinking and draws upon Africa in order to question received theoretical and methodological paradigms. When the Ruth First committee decided to focus on the media in 2018, journalist Niren Tolsi’s proposal promised a fresh approach to tackling the challenges the South African media is facing. In the wake of recent incidents involving fire in very different communities, in the Knysna area and in informal settlements, he undertook to look into how our news media covered these events and what the contrasting treatments and responses told us about the state of our journalism and news media. He placed this in the context of changes taking place in our media, notably the growth of social media, and asked what it told us about the impact this new technology was having on our public sphere. The ‘outrage machine’ of social media responded very differently to fire in informal settlements and more privileged areas such as the scenes of the Knysna fires, he showed, reinforcing antagonistic ethnic and class consciousness. Far from the original promise of new media technologies to expose us to a multiplicity of voices, it ensures we hear only what we want to hear, reinforcing social siloes rather than breaking them down. Tolsi writes: ‘The Ruth First Fellowship allowed me to think through some of the major challenges facing South African media. These include the effects of social media disinformation on SA's political stability, concentrated toxic media ownership in SA, the neuroscientific effects of social media's unethical design on the traditional bonds that mobilised communities against the worst excesses of state and corporate power. It triggered a personal quest to find SA-specific responses to this global media crisis so as to contribute towards defining a new journalism in this digital moment. Perhaps the most uplifting aspect of the fellowship has been the numerous responses I received from journalists – especially young journalists.’