The revolution will not be televised, is it different for workers in the media, workers at e-TV and e-NCA?
Media transformation in South Africa to de-monolise the industry, especially the press and the pay TV market, build diversity, and ensure accountability must include workplace transformation and decent work for all, including for journalists, regardless of race and gender. The persistence of the apartheid workplace characterised by a white-top and black-bottom pyramid in which the higher you go the better it becomes, and, inversely, the lower you remain the tougher it is, and, in the media, its impact on news content and coverage have not been given adequate attention. This is coupled with unequal treatment of workers, unequal distribution of pay, benefits and authorities on a racial and gender basis.
In addition, let us recall that in the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Frederick Engels say workers are not the slaves of the bourgeois class only, but are daily and hourly enslaved by the over-looker. Therefore the managers play a crucial role in facilitating the exploitation of workers.
Recent developments in the media as the workplace reminded us about the content of this analysis.
In the media, the managers might perhaps be playing the most decisive role given the separation between ownership and operational control. Where this model works “perfectly”, which appears as the case at e-TV and e-NCA, those who own do not exercise a say on the selection of news, news content and coverage, as well as on the entire field of related operational management. This is reserved, exclusively, to the managers who exercise editorial functions and associated oversight roles.
Last week the workers at e-SAT, commonly known as e-TV and e-NCA went out publicly in what they called “We are not free at e”. They released a statement and said it was time members of the public know what is going on in the world of work in the media, e-TV and e-NCA as examples. The news of their plight, being “not free at e”, did not make it in the media, starting where they are working for the public to see, hear and read. Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘The revolution will not be televised’, a phrase Scott-Heron adopted from the slogan of the struggles of the 1960s in the United States against the oppression suffered by black people, became as true as his first single, ‘Home is where hatred is’.
According to much of the media, everybody or other institutions and social actors in society need to be kept in check, and, importantly, by the media too functioning as the “fourth estate” (the fourth power – i.e. if one considers our context if Parliament, the Executive/Cabinet and Judiciary the first to the third power) as part of society’s checks and balances! In his book On Heroes and Hero Worship, Thomas Carlyle attributes the origins of the concept “fourth estate” to Edmund Burke who (is said to have) used it in a parliamentary debate in Britain, 1787, on the opening up of press reporting of the House of Commons. The “fourth estate” (that sat in the reporters gallery), Burke (is attributed to have) said, is more important far than the three arms of the state that had gathered in parliament.
But then who independently keeps such an important power in check? According to the media, there must be none! Let us recall that accountability to or regulation by the self is neither accountability nor regulation at all. If it were not so, the very existence of the role expected of, if not already accorded to the media – and by the media itself – as one of the important elements of the checks and balances to the exercise of power in society will be nothing but a negation of the negation.
Let us briefly look at what the workers at e-TV and e-NCA are complaining about.
They want to exercise their constitutional right of freedom of association which is further given effect to in the Labour Relations Act to join a trade union. They want a workplace forum to discuss workplace transformation.
According to their analysis, e-SAT (e.g. e-TV and e-NCA) “has over 70% black employees; and the viewership is 87% black, yet the top management (is) made up of white males only”. The workers want this discussed. They believe that the absence of transformation at e-SAT has a negative bearing on news content and coverage.
All of this indicates, according to the workers, that: “The company pays lip service to transformation, enabling an atmosphere where racism and racist innuendos thrive. Just this past week (a week before last) a white female employee referred to Indians as “Coolies” on the Output Desk. No action has been taken against her”.
According to the workers at e-SAT, the massive black audience of e-TV and e-NCA finds not expression in the editorial policy that is driven by the white-only top management. At “an editorial meeting earlier this year”, say the workers about a top manager who allegedly said: “reporting on rural areas is pointless because the ‘middle class doesn’t care about the poor’”. The e-NCA’s Africa Bureau was closed and 50 workers were retrenched, according to the workers, despite the ironical fact that e-NCA calls itself e-News Channel Africa. Meanwhile: “In May 2015, top management received 10% Salary increases and performance bonuses”, said the workers who further asked: “Performance for what? How can they be rewarded for job losses?”
The aggrieved workers further draw the attention of the public to the alleged utterances of the top manager on another occasion where “he stated that the AU Summit (held in South Africa recently) was ‘boring’ and not worthwhile”. And then they conclude: “African issues clearly have no prevalence” at e-NCA.
Alex Mashilo is SACP Spokesperson, and writes in his capacity as a Fulltime Professional Revolutionary
This article first appeared in Umsebenzi Online, the online journal of the SACP.
