The burden of the black journalist

Being the 42nd anniversary of the banning of 18 black consciousness organisations, the shutting down of The World and Weekend World, as well as the Christian Institute’s Pro Viritate, by apartheid era minister of justice Jimmy Kruger on October 19, 1977, Saturday presents apt opportunity for reflection of where media’s head space is at.

Convention entreats us to believe that the media is a tool enabling society to know itself. But few recognise that the media is three things in one – it is a business; it is a profession; it is society’s watchdog.

As a business, it can live or die like any other.

As a profession, it has distinct governing codes against which to measure its fitness for purpose to carry out its duty without fear, favour or prejudice.

As a watchdog, its credibility does not exclusively depend on it claiming it has. It extends to the public believing it answers to no party, interest group, powerful and individual personalities that may be adored or loathed.

It is important to note that without journalists, an entity called media would not exist.

But in carrying out its duty to the public’s right to know, media is vulnerable to bottom line pressures, commercial and marketing gimmicks and open to sway of owners’ temptations to pander to power.

This places distinct duty on editors to ensure that the line separating the editorial and commercial sides of the business, in its daily operations, do not cross.

Overall, journalism must have a life of its own and not that of its owners.

Journalism must outlive owners that come and go. For this reason, journalists must be judged by the quality of their work and not the companies owning the titles they work for.

Changing society inevitably becomes an extra burden to black journalists.

White journalists may, or may not, be bothered to aspire to live in a society affirming their humanity as that was distinctly a given in the oppressive racial order of things in the first place.

For black journalists, the quest for the rehumanisation of society is inescapable, save for those with deadened consciences who find it beneficial to collude with an unchanging system extolling some and degrading others.

This does not suggest that the extra burden black journalists carry commits them less to fulfilling the public’s right to know.

Black journalists are not only confronted with changing the environment in which they work, but also the broader society in which they live.

This is the burden black journalists carry that their white counterparts seldom appreciate. When black journalists take responsibility to confront their victimhood, the recurring tendency is to brand them racist.

It was exactly for this trumped-up charge that the Forum of Black Journalists was guilt-tripped out of the media scene.

It was berated during implementation of its programmes. It was denied the benefit of the doubt towards championing the goodness of its cause.

Hopefully, the 42nd anniversary, scheduled at the June 16 Memorial Centre, at Central Western Jabavu, Soweto, may just be a sobering moment for reflection.

• Ngwenya is a corporate strategist, freelance writer and journalist based in Joburg.

Oupa Ngwenya.

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