Newspapers are increasingly active on the moral stage. Which presents interesting challenges for actual advocacy groups...
Over the last 18 months you could find a range of knock-offs of the some of the big names in the contemporary African art scene at a certain park in the Joburg suburbs. Smoothly executed copies hung over the green metal fence, flapping in the wind next to piles of fire wood and lawn grass. If you weren’t into African contemporary knock-offs you could also give the ‘artists’ (who have since moved on) a head-shot of your offspring, which they would reproduce in the modern style.
This innovation continues Jozi’s long tradition as a place where creative hustlers not only find a way, but often prosper. And, of course, in South Africa it’s not just our cities. The country’s most obvious entrepreneurial revenue generator currently is electricity. From copper cable theft to coal supply cons to the calculated looting of our power stations, there is no end to the ways and areas in which our ‘system’ is being gamed.
Dubious intent is a commercial norm
Chests are beaten in the press about the criminally inclined state of the world, but there is much evidence that it has ever been thus. Remember the slave trade? Britain’s relentless pushing of opium? Those few hundred years of European colonial endeavour? These are old chestnuts, granted, but they remain undeniable, and foundational. More recently, the Al Jazeera YouTube documentary series, The Gold Mafia, laid bare not only Southern Africa’s comprehensive deconstruction of the rules of global trade through the empty political vessels of South Africa and Zimbabwe, but also Dubai’s stunningly accepted position in the global economy as a zone that takes all money, and asks no questions, ever.
And then there’s The Man Who Broke Capitalism, which tells the story of Jack Welch’s assault on the tenets of corporate business, and which forces an uncomfortable rethink of many of our most important assumptions about work, and life.
David Gelles’ book explains how Welch and GE placed shareholder value front and centre of corporate endeavour, and in the process drove the evolution of the corporation from an entity at least theoretically able to support and sustain a community of thousands of employees and business partners to something intended only to deliver vast wealth for shareholders - generally through accounting tricks and operational sleights of hand that could only ever qualify as institutionalised deceit, and which now form a dominant mode of operation across the global economy.
The Guardian’s strange cry
Within this context, The Guardian’s recent mea culpa with regards to its commercial roots in the slave trade made strange reading. The headline piece of the series, delivered by historian and broadcaster David Olusoga, was a breathless confession of unwitting moral guilt. To wit: ‘we’ve been studying everyone else’s failings for so long we were blinded to our own. We hang our mildly self-aware, chastened heads.’
A few weeks later The Guardian tore into the royal family’s ill-begotten wealth in even more detail than its own. There was order to the publication sequence. The exposé of the royals could only come after The Guardian had raised its own guilty paw. Obviously. This is the way the moral maths of the attention economy works. First reveal your own filth – an essential risk mitigation measure – and then mobilise.
That The Guardian could assume that any European business, organisation or civil society entity with a hundred year or longer history could exist without being fully knitted into the dubious fabric of the Western economy suggests a fantastical approach to self identity that fits very well within the factually unmoored ethos of the social media age. It also highlights the reality that today newspapers campaign as much as they report.
Moral mobilisation
It’s been fascinating to watch the emergence of the opinion site Unherd in the UK, which appeared from a distance to form as a home for disaffected Guardian writers, many of whom have run into the newspaper’s brick-wall approach to trans rights reporting and activism. A common accusation is that at The Guardian, important discussions about the wisdom of giving young teenagers the ability to choose a new gender (among other trans issues, such as who gets to use which loo) are muffled, at best.
Seeking to cast light on a debate that often appears as if it could rip upper-middle-class UK (most especially the Scots) apart, Unherd has quickly developed herd-like tendencies of its own, revealed by a comments section where readers are prone to tear endlessly into now-close-to-meaningless rhetorical notions such as woke-ism.
Thus, when Unherd’s Kathleen Stock (a gender-critical feminist philosopher hounded out of Sussex University by Twitter-fuelled activists) faced protestors at a recent Oxford University appearance, The Guardian gave her calculatingly cool treatment, dropping a few short, dry reports three quarters of the way down the page in the same way Fox News does when Donald Trump is found guilty of sexual assault.
The New York Times often does the same in much of its reporting on Israel and Palestine. The Washington Post is well known for functioning as a Jeff Bezos political tool as much as a Newspaper. In South Africa, The Independent clearly advocates for certain political formations aligned to its owner, Iqbal Survé. And while the Daily Maverick is widely hailed by suburban liberals for its work, it is equally assailed by other formations as a tool of white monopoly capital (a construct that was purposefully developed as a political weapon, and yet remains widely used by many publications without pause or comment).
New challenges for advocacy groups
All of which means it is becoming increasingly difficult for social organisations advocating for policy and other types of change to cut through the media. Where once newspapers were a crucial conduit for advocacy and social messaging, they now take a high degree of ownership of the advocacy process itself. Their domination of the moral landscape makes it a complex process for anyone else to tell the global public anything that isn’t already in the popular culture cross-hairs – as defined by these publications themselves.
A key challenge for social change advocates is thus now how to form alliances with media publications - rather than how to speak effectively to the public to raise awareness about issues. In sum: effective social advocacy requires getting a newspaper brand on board on a long term, campaign partner basis.
Of course, if you succeed in this, your advocacy campaign will be adding more momentum to the moral media juggernaut. And as good as this might be for your quest, it will surely happen at the expense of other equally worthy causes that are further removed from the centre of communication power.
Links
The Man Who Broke Capitalism — did Jack Welch destroy corporate America?
Slavery and The Guardian – The Ties That Bind Us
Cost of the crown - an investigation into royal wealth and finances
Why the New York Times is behind the times on Israel-Palestine