DAVID LEWIS: Confessions of a media junkie and an addict to debate

I am a self-acknowledged media junkie. Most days I read the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Guardian, Business Day, Daily Maverick and News24. I read weeklies such as the New Yorker and the Financial Mail.  

I am a devoted subscriber to Audm, a site that posts the best pieces of writing from magazines such as the Atlantic and Mother Jones. I watch Al Jazeera and the BBC and, occasionally, an SA news channel. When I drove a lot I listened to 702 and the SABC, but nowadays I hardly drive and I miss radio. 

To consume this volume of news reporting and analysis I have developed a method of skimming and selecting items I want to pay a lot of attention to, but this does not mean I only consume hard news — for the past 15 years among my must-read writers on the Financial Times have been the fashion editors, Vanessa Friedman and her successor, Jo Ellison, both astute observers of popular culture. I also consume loads of online cricket and football news.

I have other filters. I spend hardly any time on social media and I do not consume reportage and news analysis from channels that I am confident will purposefully lie to me. So I do not watch Russia Today — even when I could — or Fox News, and for much the same set of reasons I did not read the Guptas’ The New Age newspaper or watch their ANN7 television channel.  I don’t read the (London) Times or the Wall Street Journal. But I would not want these rags to be banned.

“But what about hearing the other side”, my detractors will argue. Well, that is precisely the point. While the dominant view of the news I consume on my preferred channels is clear, I am reasonably confident that the much-maligned “mainstream media” to which I am drawn — essentially the centre and left-of-centre liberal media — provides a sufficient window into the views of the “other side” to satisfy my demand to understand the full range of news and views, whether those of the broad centre or the hard right or the ultraleft. This is confirmed by the political range of opinion on many of the media platforms to which I am drawn.

The reason the dreaded “liberal media” covers a relatively wide range of news and opinion is precisely because of the continued, though increasingly assailed, strength of liberal values such as freedom of speech and expression. There is admittedly no reason to expect media investors to hold politically tolerant views. Communitarian ownership structures such as  those of the Guardian are probably the best alternatives to the illiberal views of right-wing owners.

Journalists, notoriously difficult to corral, are often a counterweight to the wishes of an opinionated owner (though less so when the owner is able to threaten recalcitrant journalists with the gulag!) and so too is the diversity of the market for media products. Indeed, the Murdoch family has done more than most to damage the liberal media by adopting a business strategy focused on domination of the large market of conservative US media consumers while abandoning competition in the market for centrist US media consumers. 

This deliberate strategy of market segmentation has produced two echo chambers, with one consuming unalloyed right-wing media content and the other similarly dominant centrist news and opinion. This underpins two media markets, with consumers in each market intolerant — indeed ignorant — of the views and news emanating from the other market, thus undermining a liberal centrist media.  

However, this strategy can only succeed in a huge market such as the US, whose conservative media consumers can support a highly profitable media asset such as Fox News. Media assets such as the Financial Times with a large global market can also afford to focus on its established readers and their ilk.

My media addiction is not only rooted in consumption of news but also in the role I have played in producing news and opinion. Over the past 50 years I have only worked in the nongovernmental organisation, trade union and public sectors. My work has traversed complex and controversial issues such as trade unionism and the development and implementation of labour market policy, industrial and competition policies and anticorruption policies.

My key insight from each of these diverse areas is the critical importance of public support for the activity in question, measured not by the natural allies it attracts but rather from those who may start off indifferent or even hostile to the activity in question. To achieve this there is no alternative to media coverage. And the most valuable media coverage is the sceptical, conditional support of the liberal media.

Unconditional support or unconditional opposition neither supports the public discussion that hones the quality of, and public support for, the product of the news or opinion in question, nor does it enhance the accountability of the producer of that news and opinion.

Engaging effectively with the media is not rocket science, but there is some art to it. Mostly, it requires a relationship born of mutual respect. The manner in which the ANC treats the media is a telling counter-example. Fellow Business Day columnist Anton Harber, the highly regarded journalist, editor and media activist, in effect characterises the ANC’s policy paper on the media, tellingly titled “The Battle of Ideas”, as a call to arms ... positioning the ANC as an organisation involved in a perpetual ideological war against enemies in the media.

“The media, it seems, is not a place to share and swap and debate ideas and information, not a tool to promote your own information or to hear what people outside Luthuli House are saying, but a front in the war against the ANC’s omnipresent and omnipowerful enemies,” Harber says.

As the ANC declines its proclivity for scapegoating the media will intensify the deterioration of the relationship. The media will focus on the woes of the ANC, which will in turn intensify the latter’s efforts to ensure a compliant media environment. The mutual hostility will grow, and so will the relationship between the ANC and the media-consuming public deteriorate, and so the ANC will decline further.

• Lewis, a former trade unionist, academic, policymaker, regulator and company board member, was a co-founder and director of Corruption Watch.