Conferences & Events
Empowering the People: Keynote Speech
by Dali Mpofu, Group CEO, South African Broadcasting Corporation
Thank you for inviting me to share some of my views on broadcasting for the empowerment of the people – a mindset we in the South African Broadcasting Corporation express as Total Citizen Empowerment. Our reference to our audiences – our broadcast constituency, stakeholders if you will – as citizens is a conscious effort to undermine the idea that they are to be regarded as mere consumers of broadcasting. It is our stubborn underlining of the people as human beings with human rights, as the ultimate owners of their broadcaster, and as active and interactive beings. It is based upon the departure point that true citizen empowerment is synonymous with human and socio-economic development as spelt out in the Millennium Development Goals.
In addressing this topic I will depart from the premise that to this audience of senior broadcasters one does not have to re-articulate the well accepted tenets of public service broadcasting (PSB) namely universal access, diversity, plurality, etc.
The questions which I would like to pose are:-
1. Accepting the standard definition of public service broadcasting has the time not come to incorporate this notion of citizen empowerment as a definitional element of PSB;
2. How can we give meaning and effect to this concept?
For the sake of clarity, I have decided to define the role of a public service broadcaster in citizen empowerment by contrasting it with its main opposites namely, a state broadcaster or a commercial broadcaster.
Before I do this comparison, let me state that I start from the fundamental premise that there are 3 key centres of powers which interplay in any modern society – state power, commercial power and people power. Ideological positions are essentially differentiated by where one places the role of each of these power blocks in social dynamics of a particular sovereign system.
In a nutshell any broadcaster which is unable, for whatever reason, to withstand, resist and whenever necessary oppose either state power or commercial power must forget about citizen empowerment.
The notion of public service broadcasting as an empowerment instrument is more clearly articulated by making reference to countries with a history of disempowerment of the people, such as apartheid South Africa, much of the African continent and the colonial diaspora, where broadcasting has previously been abused as part of state propaganda machinery by repressive undemocratic regimes, whether colonial or domestic. Public service broadcasting in this context is an act of resistance through the affirmation of public ownership of the airwaves and triumph over totalitarianism.
The state versus public ownership and control of the airwaves is, as many here might attest, a battle which continues to this day – as some of our governments see no difference between themselves and national broadcasters, in most instances using funding – or deprivation thereof – as a weapon to manipulate these broadcasters. In continuing, therefore, to wage our battle for the independence of public service broadcasters we are ipso facto empowering our people and honouring the spirit of public service broadcasting.
I must preface my analysis by stating clearly upfront that both state power and commercial power have a legitimate place in the power dynamics of modern society. In most countries represented here there exists a democratically elected and legitimate government which, by definition must exercise state power. Similarly commerce and industry play an important part in the economic life of any nation.
To put it bluntly that is what puts food on the table. Accordingly these constituencies must also wield sufficient power in society proportional to their importance. The question is guarding against the dangers of either one of these forces or both of them in concert possessing a dominant stronghold over a society and at the expense of the citizenry. It is the distinct duty of a public service broadcaster to ensure that the balance of these forces is never tilted against the people whilst acknowledging that the necessary tension between them cannot be totally eliminated.
There is thus a need for a high level of sophistication in our unpacking of the independence of the public service broadcaster – without a simplistic notion that the public service broadcaster and the state are inherently antithetical and exist in a bipolar relationship between them.
A question which follows, naturally, is how to make public service broadcasting a servant of the people – that which we refer to as the empowerment of the people in today’s topic.
In answering the question which then arises on public service broadcasting and tangible, rather than theoretical, change, we might want to begin by being true to our mandate of serving the public and not necessarily the political masters of the day. First we must acknowledge the possibility and high probability that even a perfectly legitimate and democratically elected government will not necessarily always act in the public interest. Secondly, that such a government must still be made to account to the whole population of its territory, whether or not they are supporters of that particular government. In this context, the public is a much wider concept than merely the voting public. In most Western countries participation in national elections is hovering in the 30% or 40% levels. In the US it has remained in the 25% region and yet a public broadcaster is by definition answerable and accountable to 100% of the citizens of each of those countries.
In my view this is the nub of the issue – and it partly explains why even in a democracy, a true public broadcaster needs to operate independently of the state.
An important caveat to my approach is that public service broadcasters must not be so arrogant as to anoint themselves as representatives of the common will of the people without firstly acknowledging that they are not elected representatives of the people. Secondly and consequently there are heavy responsibilities and duties which are preconditions for the PSB to earn the role of empowerer.Some of these are absolute professionalism, intergrity, credibility, fairness and above all, balance. In these areas the broadcaster must be beyond reproach and able easily to withstand any reasonable scrutiny, failing which it frankly does not deserve the special relationships of partnership, agency and trusteeship with the citizenry.
The old adage of the truth setting one free is nothing but a statement of how the truth empowers. In an era when the Commonwealth is increasingly democratizing its societies and institutions it behoves us all, as public service broadcasters, to empower our people with as truthful, as accurate, and as credible information as possible if they are to exercise two of the most basic tenets of democracy – and these are choice and participation. The other day I read a very simple definition of democracy as being about “who makes the decisions.” So the operative words of democracy are choice, participation and decision-making.
The acid test for the existence of democracy therefore, would be the answer to the question: Do all citizens exercise free and informed choices about who will make decisions regarding their lives, and are they able between elections to participate in the making of those decisions? I venture to say that in any society the extent to which citizens can boldly answer “yes” to both segments of that question is directly proportional to whether or not there is a vibrant public interest driven media sector.
Put differently, it would be difficult to satisfy this definition of democracy in the absence of a true public service broadcaster, universally accessible to all citizens. Quite obviously citizens cannot be expected to exercise informed choices if the broadcaster feeds them with lies, distortions or partisan propaganda.
People empowerment from a public service broadcast perspective must, in my view, also entail a conscious commitment to quality. Quality in this context means adherence to honest, accurate and responsible journalism untainted by personal agendas but intent on developing an informed citizenry capable of interfacing with democracy.
It implies the empowerment of our citizens to enjoy the space accorded them by democracy to enter into conversations and partnerships based on information which builds rather than destroys, for instance, in the crucial area of News and Current Affairs (the mainstay of PSB).
We therefore have to consciously eschew reporting sensationally, but without in any way avoiding exciting human and public interest stories. Angle has to be viewed as a potential maker or breaker of societies by any public service broadcaster whose mission includes people empowerment. Above all we must refrain from prescribing the choices to be made by citizens, whilst providing them with a full menu of optional viewpoints on any given subject.
A point which cannot be sufficiently over emphasized is the need to indigenise and domesticate the stories-what journalists call “perspective”. From whose perspective is the story being told? Is it from the point of view of the government, business or some other powerful constituency or the citizens?
Coupled with the above, must be a deliberate effort to seek stories that build rather than those that destroy, especially in Current Affairs reporting which sometimes needs to be distinguished from hardcore News.
Our motivation in this regard has to be that from a public relations and investor confidence perspective many of the Commonwealth countries today – principally African and Caribbean ones – are generally considered risky because of the dominance of foreign media perspectives in reporting about them from an external and often tainted perspective. The African and the Caribbean story is still being told by a media mostly physically within but largely politically, ideologically and emotionally outside those geographical areas. This has led to a preponderance of stories that cast these areas in a simplistic, naive and mostly negative rather than an objective light. This phenomenon is also a threat to the empowerment of local citizens.
The quality for the empowerment of our people, in my estimation, is the extent to which we are able to appraise, in a nuanced fashion, these reactionary agendas of undermining some of the developing countries, and to identify and defeat the subliminal colonialism which continues to view Africa and the Caribbean as economic breadbaskets fit for nothing other than ongoing exploitation, duplicitous pity, crocodile tears and double standards often motivated by racism and other forms of prejudice laced by an air of misplaced superiority.
We need consciously to oppose the global forces which seek to enslave and colonise the minds of the people in the former colonies as not good enough to resolve their own problems or even worse to portray them as the sole authors of their own misfortune. We have a duty to tell the true history of economic exploitation in these territories. Equally we have a duty to expose the corruption of many post-colonial regimes without fear or favour.
At this point I wish to pause and point out that important as it is to assert the independence of public service broadcasting from state power and interference as I have explained thus far – it is my strong view that in this century, the biggest long term threat to citizen empowerment is NOT state power but commercial power.
I contend that the ongoing globalization of a neoliberal ideological framework and agenda poses the single most important threat to citizen empowerment – and will hopefully lay the ground for what answer the institution of public service broadcasting can offer. Indeed I depart from the premise that the media, and especially the non – commercial media, present possibly the only hope to avert the otherwise inevitably fatal blow to popular democracy and people empowerment which will otherwise be struck if the neoliberal agenda is left unchallenged.
Ironically, the gathering tsunami of commercialization is a big threat not only to citizen empowerment but also to the remaining vestiges of legitimate state power. There is growing evidence that the commercial world actually determines who accedes to political power and who does not. One needs to look no further than the current presidential nomination process in the US for evidence of this.
Neoliberal ideology is based not on the power of people but the power of markets – hence the term market fundamentalism. It is "premised on the idea that the rich should rule the world ... (and)... rooted in the retreat of the state. It is rooted in the retreat of the state from critical areas of social life, including the communication area.” (McCauley)
According to this dogma people only matter as producers and consumers of goods and service not as citizens or possessors of rights. Private or commercial broadcasters are, correctly so, mainly preoccupied with the profit motive. Their function is to maximize profits for their shareholders and anything else is of secondary importance.
To believe that commercial broadcasters can be primarily concerned with the empowerment of the people with information, etc would be tantamount to believing that a fruitseller is primarily concerned with the healthy dietary habits of the nation – or that shareholders of a construction company are primarily driven by considerations of universal human shelter!
Accordingly we need to understand and accept that when it comes to citizen empowerment, the commercial media is most certainly not part of the solution but part of the problem. “A business-run media system in an inegalitaian society will never reflect the interests of the whole population-a corporate media cannot represent the majority of citizens” (McCauley)
The two inevitable products or concomitant products of this ideological outlook which I now turn to, are privatization and consumerism. Privatisation is best described as deliberate shrinkage of the public domain or the “social commons”. Its adherents genuinely believe that privatized entities will ultimately benefit the whole of society through improved efficiency, etc.of private enterprise. The truth of course is that there are certain public goods such as health, transportation, energy and indeed broadcasting whose privatization can only spell doom for the general good and social development –and will spell the systematic disempowerment of citizens, due to the markets blunted ability to determine how and for what purpose these essential goods and services are produced and due to leaving those decisions to the unpredictable vagaries of the market and the self-serving whim of investors.
The terrible twin brother of privatization is consumerism. This is best described by Benjamin Barber as the infantilisation of society. He argues eloquently that the new culture of consumerism deliberately turns adults into perpetual infants whose needs are prescribed by the market and by marketing and branding experts.
The kinds of adults who are ideal for those markets are people who care only about their narrow self-interest and not broader public issues of public education, health, democracy, and etc.but about the latest fashion, sunglasses and cars – addicts of shopping.
It has been shown that advertisers now deliberately target 6 month old babies so that they can be ‘caught whilst still young’ and turned into perpetual consumers or “kidults”.If we allow that amount of power to business or future minds then we are not only encouraging the mental disempowerment of today’s citizens but those of tomorrow.
Technological advances are used to reinforce this culture rather than to benefit society as a whole. Thus it is more preferable to the market that children are addicted to video- games and dumbed-down television than that they learn social skills through playing with other children. They should prefer fast food, pizza and hamburgers than learning about healthy nutrition. There is evidence that the growing social problem of obesity in both the US and England is directly related to this cultural shift.Ironically, it is only when these problems assume wider social or public proportions that their social consequences are realized. The clear result of the infantillist consumerist culture is a systematic disempowerment of citizens, which it is our duty not only to expose but also to oppose.
The answer to this trend is partly found in the following approach espoused by MP Mc Cauley and others in their view that “(T)he audience – as public – consists not of consumers, but of citizens who must be reformed, educated, informed as well as entertained – in short, “served” – presumably to enable them to better perform their democratic rights and duties……Within this context, broadcasting has nothing to do with the consumerist hedonism of commercial broadcasting.”
A point of departure, in that regard, must be commitment to fundamental social change. Public service broadcasting, in my view, has to be a catalyst for positive change – an empowering form of transformation – especially in developing societies. As McCauley and others, again, say, “Public service broadcasting is explicitly received as an interventionist institutional practice. It should presumably contribute to the construction of “quality” citizens rather than merely catering to, and therefore reinforcing and reproducing, the already existing needs and wants of consumers. Succinctly, in classic public service philosophy the project of broadcasting is an “art of effects” aimed at reforming the audience.”
If I have not depressed you enough (as is my intention) by pointing out to the enormous threats posed separately by the state power and commercial power to the idea of citizen empowerment then consider this:
Current trends suggest that there is a growing alliance or alignment of forces between the state and commerce – if true, this lethal combination poses even a greater threat to any notion of empowerment of the people.
I have already referred to the role played by corporations in determining the outcomes of democratic elections. If we accept that corporate bosses would be fired by their employers if they spent money or any activity which is not of primary self-interest to the corporations’ shareholders then we must concede that corporate donations during elections can only be justified on the basis that they are in the short, medium or long term interests of the donors. Needless to say, the collective interests of corporations are almost always inimical to the broader interest of society.
As another author, Joel Bakan puts it:
“The twentieth century was unique in modern history for the widely held belief that democracy required governments to protect citizens’ social rights and meet their fundamental needs.....Through a process known as privatization, governments have capitulated and handed over to corporations control of institutions once thought to be inherently “public” in nature. No part of the public sphere has been immune to infiltration of for-profit corporations. Water and power utilities,police,fire and emergency services, day care centers, welfare services, social security, colleges and universities, research, prisons, airports, healthcare, genes, broadcasting, the electromagnetic spectrum, public parks, and highways have all, depending on the jurisdiction, undergone, or are being considered for, full or partial privatization.”
Once again, in case there is still someone who is not yet depressed or who thinks that the challenge of citizen empowerment is easy to achieve, let me point out that the growing phenomenon called globalization adds a third and more difficult and potent dimension to the neoliberal ethos and accordingly a separate obstacle to social progress. This being a meeting of broadcasters from international constituency, namely the Commonwhealth, perhaps this topic assumes evens more relevance.
Barber demonstrates the connection between consumerism, privatization and globalization as follows:
“As privatization serves infantilisation and regression by privileging the personal over the public and private liberty over public liberty, privatization is in turn served by the changing character of the modern world perhaps most significantly by globalization.Globalisation effectively outsources privatization. That is to say, it takes the ideological claim that markets should be sovereign – a claim that is countered within nation states by the claim that only the state can be sovereign, that only a public(a people) can claim sovereignty – and globalizes it. In the anarchic international arena where there is no popular sovereignty but only an international state of anarchy, the argument for market sovereignty is unopposed. On the global level, the idea of the commonweal has no traction since there is no global political body to legitimize or reinforce it.
The primal economic forces that the public sector traditionally regulated and controlled within states have now escaped their sovereign boundaries. The battle between democracy and markets, between public and private that still persists within states has no international counterpart. There markets are trump, citizens nonexistent and global sovereignty a dream. In the absence of even a hint of a global citizenry, there is and can be no democratic flywheel to moderate the capitalist whirlwind.”
Perhaps the CBA should consider how we can institute or promote a system of global citizenship. My suggestion is that this notion can be built around common transnational issues such as HIV/AIDS, environmental degradation, drug trafficking, the Millennium Development Goals, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, etc.
In summary then, I hope I have demonstrated that the road to citizen empowerment is littered with very real and big obstacles which conspire, like landmines, to render the task a difficult one indeed. The task, however, is not impossible and it would be the height of irresponsibility to those committed to the betterment of humanity to throw their hands up in the air and give up without trying. As a South African activist I can assure you that fighting injustice is more glorious when the enemy is so formidable and the chances of victory are clearly miniscule, when the struggle ahead seems to the naked eye both dangerous and futile.
To be sure, I have mentioned not less than 6 obstacles blocking the path to empowerment of the people, namely:-
1. Totalitarian regimes (with their state broadcasters, military police,etc)
2. Democratic governments (increasingly capitulating to corporate influence)
3. Neoliberal ideology (especially market fundamentalism)
4. Consumerism (and infantillisation of adult citizens)
5. Privatisation of the public sphere (which entrenches inequality) and
6. Globalisation (of inequality and poverty)
No doubt this list is not exhaustive, suffice to say that these issues individually and in combination present enough challenges and hopefully drive the simple point that true people empowerment will not occur without a lot of concerted effort, struggle and a degree of sacrifice.
In searching for solutions I cannot put it in any better than Barber in his book.
“We undoubtedly live in an age of capitalism triumphant, but for democracy and variety to survive, capitalism will have to moderate its triumph and citizens renew their calling, globally as well as nationally. We need democratic sovereignty to moderate market anarchy and market monopoly. But sovereignty is no longer viable within nations alone. Paradoxically, as its most enthusiastic advocates acknowledge, capitalism itself requires such moderation for its own flourishing. Yet given the realities of the cultural ethos portrayed here, moderating capitalism and renewing the civic calling are formidable tasks, the more so because that will have to be achieved globally as well as domestically. Formidable but doable. Democracy is always aspirational rather than a done deal, more of a continuing journey than a found destination. Citizenship must have also seemed an improbable destiny for the subject of monarchical rule in England in 1650 or for the victims of totalitarian Europe in 1940.Yet by 1689, and parliamentary rule was secured in England and by the 1950s rival European nations at war for three hundred years had learned to pool their sovereignty and create the beginnings of a European citizenship.
Today under the hyperconsumerist conditions we have examined here, the civic calling will feel too many people like a vacant phrase, global citizenship like a utopian dream. I do not have a formula for their realization. Yet the brute realities of interdependence make them both necessary and in the long term (if we have a long term) inevitable. The only question is whether we discover or invent and then embrace new forms of global civic governance which the costs of the infantilist ethos cry out for, and which the crises of consumer capitalism mandate; or whether we first pay a terrible price in puerility, market chaos, and unrewarding private freedom.
That price is already being paid, but paid by those who can least afford it, the very children we think to emulate and empower with our foolish addiction to the culture of infantilism.
This is the critical point in which the history of capitalism and of its ingenious and ever-changing justifying ethos has brought us. Yet always, it is a history we have made for ourselves. So that as always, even under the harsh but seductive dominion of capitalism triumphant, the fate of citizens remains in our hands.”
So my message to this important assembly is simple: True and total citizen empowerment is difficult but doable. The institution of Public service broadcasting may well present the last hope to deal with this matter without bloodshed and with minimal human suffering. This is certainly our duty as PSB’s operating within our domestic boundaries. But in the context of this bi-ennial meeting I wish to venture to propose that the CBA should strike the first blow.
The Commonwealth, itself a symbol of the triumph of the human spirit against all odds, to overcome injustice such as that which was posed by the scurges of colonialism, racism and apartheid, must examine the need to build a global citizen movement along the lines I have already suggested.
At the SABC we have recently adopted a new vision of “Broadcasting for Total Citizen Empowerment.” We are suitably flattered that we have been asked to share the genesis of this fresh outlook to public service broadcasting and hope that enough of our international peers will find meaning in this approach. As part of this vision we conceive of “citizens” not in the dictionary meaning of the word but as a three-dimensional concept referring to firstly our employees, secondly the citizens of our country who are our ultimate owners, and of more relevance today the global citizens making up the rest of humanity, with a special focus on the African Continent. I mention this as a possible basis for the further conceptualization and refinement of the idea of global citizenship as an anchor for people empowerment.
I challenge this gathering and the new leadership which will be elected on Saturday, to take up the cause of citizen empowerment, fully cogniscant of the dangers to which I have alluded, and to spearhead its incorporation into the global mandate of Public service broadcasting and other progressive institutions and to make a public call to that effect.
A useful start would be to ensure that the issues I have raised are subjected to robust internal and external debate so that when we meet again in 2yrs time, hopefully in South Africa, we will be able to measure how far we are from reaching the necessary destination of an international version of Broadcasting for Total Citizen Empowerment.
Chairperson, fellow delegates, the time for concerted action to empower all our people is not tomorrow. The time is now.
I thank you once again for your attention.
REFERENCES
1. Bakan, J., The Corporation. (Constable & Robinson ltd.London, 2005.)
2. Barber, B.R., CONSUMED. ( W.W.Norton & Company. ltd. London,2007.)
3. McCauley, P. et al. Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest. (M.E.Sharpe, Inc.2003.)