Harare — TWO recent publications on the media in Africa, namely; "Handbook on Journalism Ethics: African Case Studies" (published by the Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa, and the Media Institute for Southern Africa) and "Media Report: Reporting Corruption in Southern Africa" (by Human Rights Trust of Southern Africa), share a common basic weakness.

They accept the linear view which media owners and journalists promote about the role of mass media services and journalists in society: that they are watchdogs whose roles include helping the public to expose corruption and other crimes.

In the donor-sponsored "Handbook on Journalism Ethics: African Case Studies", Dr S T Kwame Boafo takes this innocent, naïve and linear view of the media when he seeks to have readers assume that a "free and independent Press" as well as "the free-flow of information" characterise Africa after 1989 and contribute to good governance which he defines as including the following:

(a) Accountability: it is contended that good governance requires accountability by public officials, both elected political leaders and civil servants whose public functions must be guided by and geared towards serving societal and communal needs and interests. These include the allocation of public funds, providing for the safety and security of citizens, and the equitable pursuit of the economic well being for society;

(b) Transparency: good governance requires transparency in public procedures and decision-making processes, which, in turn, entails access to and provision of reliable and accurate information;

(c) Participation: good governance requires popular participation (particularly of civil society) in social, political and economic debate and decision-making processes and the recognition of public opinion;

(d) Rule of law: this implies a fair and even application of law, without prejudice, to all members of the society;

(e) Partnership between public and private sectors; and

(f) Respect for fundamental rights of human beings as recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the African Charter on Peoples and Human Rights.

"Media Report: Reporting Corruption in Southern Africa", another donor funded report, assumes an equally linear approach and functionalist role for mass media in that it accepts the claim that mass media services and journalists are watchdogs helping to fight corruption by demanding accountability and transparency in social institutions.

Some of the basic questions, which any objective researcher ought to consider, are:

• What are the mass media?
• What authority do mass media services, journalists and advertisers have to exercise the watchdog role?
• What is the actual history of mass media services and journalists in real societies, as opposed to their ideals, aspirations and purported functions in Africa?
• Are mass media services and journalists immune to corruption and are they themselves not capable of corrupting society?
• On what theory or conceptual framework is the assumption based, which claims that mass media services, editors and journalists are automatic watchdogs for democracy, transparency and accountability capable of curbing corruption, injustice and tyranny?
• Have the mass media played their role in promoting peace and development in Africa?

In examining the role of mass media services, editors and journalists should not start by according these same players a God-given function, which automatically precludes them from scrutiny.

Instead, there are several distinct conceptual frameworks from which the role of mass media services, editors and journalists can be examined.

The neo-liberal approach has been in vogue, especially since the 1980s, and it is the one favoured by the World Bank and most Northern donor agencies and NGOs in their dealings with the South and the East. The NIZA-MI SA handbook and the SAHRIT report cited above are based on this perspective. So is the doctrine of free-flow of information.

Any democratic environment should provide space for both public and private media because they both have their roles to play, but each media sector should adhere to professional journalistic standards and ethics.

This is a position subscribed to by member states of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation, Zimbabwe included. Indeed Unesco member states have made an undertaking for the next two years to uphold professional journalistic standards.

In "Violence in and by the Media," Professor George Gerbner describes the corrupting and criminalising role of the media as instruments of power on a global scale:

"They serve as projective devices that isolate acts and people from meaningful contexts and set them up to be stigmatised... Stigma is a mark of disgrace that evokes disgraceful behaviour.

"Labelling some people barbarians makes it easier to treat them as barbarians would (treat them) . . . classifying some people as criminals permits dealing with them in ways otherwise criminal; it makes it legitimate to attack and kill them . . . Stigmatisation and demonising isolate their targets and set them up to be victimised."

The linear perspective is particularly Euro-centric and northern.

It is important to understand its effect on our uses of the mass media not only because media training is dominated by Northern concepts and Northern money but also because the North is daily interfering with African efforts to tackle corruption.

That is why it is critical to note that some media misrepresentations against the DRC and Zimbabwe in 2001 were an echo of similar falsehoods peddled against the DRC in 1961 when the Congolese revolution was derailed and Patrice Lumumba assassinated.

The eagerness by the media to peddle falsehoods about what was happening in the Congo is not only similar to their eagerness to misrepresent the Zimbabwe war of liberation against settler Rhodesia but also to distort the struggle of the Zimbabwean liberation movement and Government in later years to reclaim land from white settlers.

A Lesson from the Founders of the African Union

In his "Africa must unite" speech at the founding of the Organisation of African Unity on May 25, 1963, Kwame Nkrumah, one of the African luminaries who politically influenced President Mugabe, includes the need for "a continental communication system" among the necessary pillars for a united Africa.

This aspect of Nkrumah's vision has been deleted or downplayed, even by Africans who pay lip service to Nkrumah's legacy and vision. Imperialism has succeeded in getting Africans to accept and promote African media fragmentation and marginalisation in the name of media pluralism.

When Zimbabwe was chair of the OAU, a decision was made by the OAU to establish a Pan African Office in Senegal. The office was duly opened and functioned for only five years and collapsed due to French subversion which influenced some African countries to withhold support for the office.

Yet Nkrumah did not only call for the creation and consolidation of Pan-African media; he also identified the chief enemy of African unification via media and culture as the United States of America using its United States Information Agency which he called "The Chief executor of US psychological warfare" against Africa in particular and the South and the East in general.

In "Neo-colonialism: The last Stage of Imperialism," Nkrumah describes an activity of the US Government, which incidentally is still being carried out against Zimbabwe and many other countries today, when he said:

"In developing countries, the United States Information Agency, actively tries to prevent expansion of national media of information so as itself to capture the market place of ideas. It spends huge sums for publication and distribution of about 60 newspapers and magazines in Africa, Asia and Latin America...

"To ensure its agency a complete monopoly in propaganda, for instance, many agreements of economic co-operation offered by the US include a demand that Americans (or their close allies) be granted preferential rights to disseminate information. At the same time, in trying to close the new nations to other sources of information, it employs other pressures."

Nkrumah then gave examples of the application of "other pressures." He cites several African countries where the US was granted permission to open its United States Information Service centres.

These countries took it for granted that since the US preached the gospel of "free-flow of information," other countries such as China, The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Cuba would also be allowed to open and operate similar centres of their own in the same countries where the US centres had free reign.

To their shock, these African countries were told not to allow competing countries to open and operate similar centres unless they wanted all so-called "aid" cut off.

Nkrumah's account helps to put into historical perspective Zimbabwe's current struggles against EU and US propaganda.

In the run-up to the celebrations of World Press Freedom Day, which were followed by celebrations of African Unity Day in 2006, the then US Ambassador to Zimbabwe Christopher Dell moved freely throughout Zimbabwe attacking the Government for being "intolerant of diverse views and for not allowing the free-flow of information".

The same United States Embassy and United States Information Agency for which Dell was the head in Zimbabwe were distributing banning letters against citizens of Zimbabwe who, since 2002, are not allowed to enter the territory of the United States because they speak and write against US interference in the internal affairs of Zimbabwe and other countries or because they head ministries or other institutions which seek to strengthen Zimbabwe's sovereignty against Western intervention.

Several media workers and experts in Zimbabwe have been on the Western countries' ban lists since 2002, the year in which then US president George W. Bush signed into law the anti-Zimbabwe sanctions Bill now called the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act.

But in the run-up to the World Press Freedom Day and while Dell was accusing Zimbabwe of being intolerant, the United States Department of State was using the same US Embassy and the USIA in Zimbabwe to distribute ban letters widening the list of banned Zimbabweans far beyond the 2002 list. Some of the banned people are journalists, academics and intellectuals.

The US "champions of freedom of expression and free-flow of information" in 2006 wrote their ban letters (dated April 10, 2006 but delivered on April 24, 2006) which read in part as follows:

"On February 22, 2002, the President of the United States signed a Proclamation (very democratic) suspending the entry into the United States as immigrants or non-immigrants those persons responsible for actions that threaten Zimbabwe's democratic institutions or impede the transition to a multi-party democracy. The entry into the United States of the spouses of such persons was also suspended.

"Information available to the US Department of State indicates that you may be covered by this proclamation. Accordingly, you are hereby notified (or renotified, in case you received a previous notification) that you and your spouse may be ineligible to receive visas to enter the United States except as provided for by the Proclamation's terms."

What America was demonstrating through this proclamation was the ironic fact that being democratic and respecting democratic institutions means ruling the world by "proclamation!" Global apartheid bans and rules undesirable peoples by proclamation. How can we call this democracy?

The ban allows only sponsored or allied persons and organisations to travel to the US and help to confirm and reconfirm the US government's own lies about Zimbabwe, about Cuba, about Iraq and now about Iran.

Those whose voices and writings portray US claims as sheer lies are not allowed into the US because they may contaminate the pure propaganda picture which US propaganda channels and collaborators have already created.

In the meantime, US citizens and diplomats travel freely throughout the length and breadth of Zimbabwe, preaching freedom of expression and free-flow of information.

A whole imperialist giant in the world of propaganda is scared of poor writers and academics from places as little Zimbabwe.

What makes the matter not so laughable is the fact that too many African leaders have failed to heed Nkrumah's message to create Pan-African communications networks and Pan-African media content.

The ban letters being distributed by the US government between 2002 and now show how ruthless western countries are when it comes to the protection not just of their material interests but also of their viewpoint.

Not since the days of the white apartheid regime of South Africa have so many African intellectuals, writers and revolutionaries been banned from entering the USA and the European Union countries.

The ruthlessness of the US ruling class when it comes to advancing its propaganda interests was recognised by Kwame Nkrumah more than 40 years ago.

It can be seen in the crafting of the US Patriot Act. And it has been shown in the creation and protection of the so-called "embedded journalist" since the 1980s.

Recently, it was shown when the US shut down more than 20 Internet sites in 2004. According to solidarity.indymedia.org.uk: "More than 20 Indymedia sites around the world were taken down (by US authorities as a result of raids made on October 7, 2004."

As can be read from Nkrumah's analysis of US efforts to monopolise propaganda on a worldwide scale, it is not only Africa which needs a collective response.

The recently concluded "Agreement for the Application of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America and the People's Trade Agreements" involving Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela has a significant provision on media which reminds us of what Nkrumah had in mind for Africa.

The three-way Latin American agreement on media and communication reads as follows: "The governments (of Bolivia, Cuba and Venezuela shall reinforce co-operation in the field of communication, by taking any action necessary to strengthen their infrastructure capacities in respect of transmission, distribution, telecommunications, ... and in respect of their informative, cultural and educational content production capacities.

In this regard, the governments shall continue to support the space devoted to integrationist communication created by Telesur (a regional satellite TV network), by increasing its distribution in our countries, as well as its content production capacities."

In other words, one of the areas of media co-operation has already been realised: a regional satellite TV network replacing and challenging CNN in order to foster Latin American integration and unity against US information imperialism.

Africa has much to learn from this Latin American venture but US agencies; collaborators and allies will discourage any policies remotely resembling what Bolivia, Cuba and Venezuela have just agreed on

Conclusion

Poorly regulated media in Kenya played a direct role in fuelling the hysteria which resulted in the deaths of more than 1 500 people and the dislocation of more than 250 000 others. During the crisis in late 2007 and early 2008, it was difficult to believe that the media in Kenya were competing for truth and transparency.

Another example of the negative role of the media is to be found in Rwanda where radio played a role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Radio was ethnically manipulated leading up to the genocide, which demonstrates the media's influence for good or bad.

As former British prime minister Tony Blair admitted in his Reuters lecture at the time of his retirement, the mass media today compete mostly for impact, not for truth and transparency.

Therefore small nations have no choice but to regulate media ownership and media governance in the interest of democracy.

The details of how that is to be done must differ from country to country and be the subject of internal debate and not foreign interference.

This is part of the opening speech delivered by Media, Information and Publicity Minister, Webster Shamu to the Regional Roundtable on Media, Peace and Development in Africa at Africa University yesterday.