Sorry, Max and Ferial: Ignoring the EFF won’t make them go away

It finally happened. After years of the EFF’s status as darlings of the media, journalists – many of whom themselves contributed to the EFF mania back when many South Africans were united against a common enemy called Zuma – have decided it’s time to cut them off.

This follows the party’s post-Zuma descent into a parody of a liberation movement, complete with conspiracy theories and a growing number of corruption allegations, which they’ve reacted to by launching vicious attacks against their newfound bogeyman, Pravin Gordhan, as well as a group of journalists they’ve dubbed the ‘Ramaphosa defence force’.

Calls for an EFF media embargo were underlined by a Twitter poll from a member of this supposed defence force, Ferial Haffajee. She asked journalists if we will “stand in solidarity” with the Sunday Times and eNCA in ceasing to cover both the EFF and Minister of Women in the Presidency Bathabile Dlamini, as they have both been accused of banning journalists from their events.

Journalists poll: are you going to stand in solidarity with colleagues at @SundayTimesZA and @eNCA and not cover @EFFSouthAfrica and Minister Bathabile Dlamini, both of whom banned media outlets from events and interviews?

— Ferial Haffajee (@ferialhaffajee) November 25, 2018

Haffajee’s tweet was given a somewhat ironic angle when Malema spoke outside the police station where he laid charges against Minister of Public Enterprises Pravin Gordhan on Tuesday, only for it to be covered live by both TimesLive and eNCA, the very news networks we are meant to ignore the party in solidarity with. It was also covered in a live Twitter thread by News24, the media house Haffajee represents. Clearly, following through on an EFF media outage will take time.

Max du Preez, another member of this supposed elite league of presidential defenders, published a column that took this all a step further, saying those journalists among us who give “unnecessary oxygen” to the party are somehow “betraying their real calling as servants of the truth and of freedom of speech”.

The message is clear: you’re either with us or against us; one of the good guys or one of the bad guys; a noble journalist or a gutter journalist.

It’s all very well written too, with a righteous air about it and plenty of moral authority dripping from each paragraph. If you’re the kind of person who likes to nod sagely along to words of wisdom, you couldn’t find a better column.

There’s only one problem.

The idea that simply ignoring the EFF will make them go away is, at best, wishful thinking.

Max du Preez founded Vrye Weekblad, a newspaper that was incredibly important in the struggle against apartheid in the late 1980s and early 1990s. How would Du Preez have responded if someone told him to stop covering the speeches of PW Botha on the basis that these speeches were spreading lies?

Where do you draw the line when it comes to filtering out provocative voices? Do we stop covering any politician who has attacked the media, a long list that includes US President Donald Trump and former president Jacob Zuma? Does Du Preez think racists such as Vicki Momberg and Penny Sparrow should also be ignored? If we censor or ignore the voice of every South African who has anything hateful to say, our news cycle may become a pleasant echo chamber, but it certainly won’t reflect reality.

Du Preez even suggests that footage of EFF speeches should be stripped of anything deemed defamatory or incendiary.

“I would strongly argue that the footage and recordings of all future EFF events should in future be viewed and fact-checked – and stripped of incendiary talk and wild defamation – before they are broadcast on radio or television,” he said.

What he seems to be going for is some kind of bland consensus in the hope that if we portray South Africa as gentler than it is, it will become so. I imagine his column will make him very popular among many readers, and that my disagreeing with them will probably not go down too well either.

But I can’t agree that to stop covering toxic elements of our society or political system is the way to neutralise these elements, an idea often advanced by The Citizen’s readers when we write about whoever in particular they find troubling.

I would argue that if Malema calls Pravin Gordhan a “dog” and Pauli van Wyk “satan” we need to know about this. Will covering what appears to be the party’s spectacular unravelling earn them new supporters? Or will refusing to do so dampen the enthusiasm of these supporters? I would argue not.

Rather, and here I think I agree with Du Preez, what is needed is critical coverage of the EFF’s utterances. Covering an EFF press conference does not have to mean condoning what is said at that conference. Columns critical of the EFF are important, but so is documenting what the third-largest party says and does, particularly if it’s wrong.

There are many arguments to be made against an EFF media blackout.

One is suggesting journalists who cover the hatred and lies spread by the EFF are a problem when really it’s the EFF itself that is – really, you’re just shooting the messenger.

Another is that, by writing think pieces about not giving the EFF any airtime, you are ironically giving them airtime. I’m not sure you can make an arbitrary distinction between columns talking about the EFF, even if they’re telling other journalists to ignore them, and articles that just simply cover them.

Yet another is that documenting a person or party’s actions does not mean endorsing those actions. Certainly, from what I’ve seen, in many cases in the SA media recently, it has meant quite the opposite. I agree with Du Preez that if we do cover the EFF we should not simply report everything they say as fact, but we do need to report on the fact that they said it.

Most of all, I feel that the notion that the incendiary parts of EFF speeches should be edited out verges on something out of George Orwell’s 1984. We would be presenting a sanitised version of what’s actually happening to readers.

The sad reality is that the EFF’s supporters, who largely see the media in broad terms as one big anti-black conspiracy, will believe anything the party says, regardless of media criticism or qualification. This is the power of populism. Du Preez correctly mentions the example of Donald Trump.

Trump once said he could stand on New York’s Fifth Avenue “and shoot somebody” without it denting his popularity. The same could be said for many of the EFF’s supporters, who have reacted to the party’s recent media threats and corruption scandals by boldly declaring they will still vote for the party come 2019.

EFF supporters call any opposition to the party’s message ‘Stratcom’; Trump supporters call it ‘mainstream media’ or ‘fake news’, but it’s the same cynical strategy.

The EFF’s hatred will continue unabated, independent of the how the media reacts to it.

By exposing this hatred, all we’re doing is our jobs.

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