Letter from America By Ken Mufuka
I know something about freedom of the press. On a Sunday morning, March 24 1984, I took Prince Charles of Britain on a tour of Great Zimbabwe.
I had just returned from training at the British Museum in London. Two brothers, a minister of Foreign Affairs and another minister made my work difficult. I wrote about their obnoxious behaviour in The Sunday Mail. Willie Musarurwa, the Editor, was dismissed over the issue.
It was a matter of time before they caught up with me. I phoned my Dean of College in the middle of the night for permission to return to the United States. With hindsight, I would not have used the words “barbaric behaviour” in describing their actions. I would have used the word “unfortunate and uncalled for behaviour.” The issue in African politics is whether the media should be allowed to say what they want to say, and expose the corruption of African politicians, without consequences to themselves. I am aware of the power of the pen.
People can lose their jobs after a well-documented expose` of corrupt activities in the print or television media. Editors and correspondents are not elected. If allowed to run rampant, they can wield enormous power without accountability, except to their owners. In the United States, the freedom of the press is enshrined in the constitution. The press here has no limits, whether moral or otherwise. Their publications like Playboy (or Playgirl) daily emasculate the sensibilities of a large majority of Americans. There is nothing that can be done about it.
Two South Africans, Michael Spicer, president of Business Leadership, SA, and Bobby Godsell, president of the Chamber of Mines threw their hats in the ring on August 20. The ANC is considering a revision of the media laws. These two believe that in a democracy, the media should regulate itself. In as far as corrupt African politicians want to run rampant without anybody saying anything about it; we agree that the media should be unleashed as a corrective.
The issue with Playboy magazine is that given a free reign, that magazine can run rampant and rough shod with public sensibilities; in this case imposing corrupt western cultures on innocent African cultures. Do these relatively innocent cultures deserve some protection from hard core porn queens and kings of the American underground culture?
The medical associations are generally self-regulating. The result, in the US, is that entry is restricted in order to keep physicians’ salaries high. Prices for services are generally beyond reach for the majority of Americans. Churches are self-regulating, and there have been serious abuses of privileges by paedophilic clergy. Can any organisation self-regulate and avoid abuses of that privilege?
A matter which worries African politicians more than any other is the abuse of the press by media moguls. Where imperial powers have failed to overthrow governments, media houses can conspire to demonise an elected leader through print and television media.
Let us say that an Australian politician loses the blessings of media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, he can say good bye to politics itself. In Australia alone, Murdoch has 18 newspapers, three of them national. He also owns such heavyweight international journals like The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Dow Jones, Far Eastern Economic Review and Marketwatch. Through these financial journals, word can get out that a politician’s policies are cookoo and bad for world financial markets. Thus, that politician can become a pariah at home and abroad.
It is suspected that Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News networks have an agenda to delegitimise the Obama presidency by any means necessary. To further this aim, it hired some brilliant hatchet men, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reily and Glenn Beck to denigrate Obama 24 hours a day.
Here are just a few of their hatchet jobs. They started early challenging Obama’s citizenship. They did not challenge President George W. Bush who was born in England, where his father was an ambassador. They challenged almost every Obama appointment, managing to drive away, after his appointment, Van Jones, for sins committed in the past.
They smeared voters advocate group called Acorn, and turned it into a communist outfit. This group has been financed by grants from all the previous four administrations. They worked in cahoots with an apparatchik who tricked Acorn to support a criminal enterprise by a sleazy woman.
They conduct double-barrelled opinion polls intended to show the president slipping down in public favour. They actually financed and spearheaded Glenn Beck’s protest movement.
The protest march is supposedly about “honour.”
They have likened Obama with Stalin and Hitler. Murdoch was asked about that. “No, no, not one of our men, “ was his answer. They terrorised the government. A woman called Shirley Sherrod was dismissed from her job at Agriculture on trumped-up charges of racism in a speech she had given in March. The whole affair was cooked up, and the government chickened out.
Many of the accusations are outright misleading. Obama is accused of mortgaging our children’s future with huge borrowings to fund government operations and bail out Wall Street bankers. It was Bush’s war in Iraq that consumed US$888 billion dollars. It was also Hank Paulson, Bush treasury secretary, who bailed out Wall Street bankers. Such an outfit actually makes news rather than report news. It can change the course of human events.
What if a foreign media group reveals an agenda to overthrow an elected government, and has an overwhelming percentage of media coverage in an African country? Shall that media group be protected, as is the case in the United States? Should a self appointed Press Council judge its own members in such cases?
What sayest thou, our readers?
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