Understanding Mainstream Media

By PHILIP NYALUNGU AKA MZAMANI

I came to Grahamstown late last year (2017) to study Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University. I regard myself as an activist-journalist. I have spent over a decade in community organisation and I have made efforts to develop grassroots media and communications over the years. So, I locate myself in the progressive-alternative media tradition of South Africa and not the commercial or nationalist media.

I view mainstream media in the country as being out of touch with “labour and life in the townships” (Wigston 2007, 40).

My interest is with the people whose voices are not heard.

Christiaans et al. (2009, 31) note that the powerless and oppressed are silenced and in general “do not participate actively in social and political life” of mainstream society.

The media does not view them as significant enough to report on or as a potential audience for its products. In any society, there are extensive constituencies who are not formally disenfranchised but are excluded or marginalised by their level of education, income, place of residence, health, race, social problems, criminalisation, or combination of these factors.

Although these communities are not often represented in the media, when they are, it is in particular ways, such as adopting the role of helpless victims or disruptive protesters. This is particularly when their lives or actions interfere with privileged society and their access to capital (Christian et al. 2009, 31).

A Postgraduate Diploma module on 'Institution and Representation' facilitated by Dr Priscilla Boshoff at the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes reinforced these points, raising questions about South African journalism, its institutional production, representational practices and social reception.

Another module on Economic Journalism also contributed to my understanding of the media. The views of the director of the South African Reserve Bank Centre for Economic Journalism (SARB-CEJ) at the School has been very compelling and it strengthened my passion for an activist journalism. Mr Ryan Hancocks said that this country needs journalists that report about the downtrodden rather than the elites and middle classes.

He argued that economics journalism is almost completely silent on the informal economic activities that many of the poor and working class rely on to make ends meet. The informal economy serves millions of people in poor communities and is a significant contributor to the South African economy and it is deplorable that is ignored.

Nevertheless, Schudson (1999, 118) acknowledges that “information is what we have – we live in a sea of information,” we need to makes sense of it. There are some key materials that assist, such as the work of Stuart Hall (1980, 2013), Jeanne Prinsloo (2009), Ien Ang (1985, 1990) and work on South African media (Fourie, 2007).

Cultural Studies scholar, Stuart Hall (1980, 2013), argues that media presents meanings, and that there is a dominant code of meanings. Ideas or concepts are signified, with meanings represented with signifier or sign e.g. a sound, a printed word or an image. A sign is the encoded form, which is decoded in the concept or mind. But, a sign is complex. Hall argued that denotation and connotation represent primary and secondary meaning of a sign, respectively. We can analyse signs and meanings, by looking at how they fit together and also how people decode them. Hall argue people have to engage the meanings through the signs, but that people can decode them in different ways. The media has to present meanings that people can decode, but it cannot control the decoding.

If no meaning is taken, there can be no consumption. If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has no effect. The value of this approach is that each of the moments, in articulation, is necessary to the circuit as a whole, no one moment can fully guarantee the next moment… (Hall, 1980, p. 129).

In order to be effective, for example, broadcasting institutions have to reflect audiences’ socioeconomic and political experiences. But viewers might take a different meaning from the sign presented before them. This means the audience can operates outside the dominant code, said Hall.

Prof Prinsloo from Rhodes used Tzvetan Todorov’s five narratives stages starting from equilibrium (its disruption, realisation, repair and restoration) and Vladmir Propp’s six stages (preparation, complication, transference, struggle, return and recognition) to analyse media texts. She defines narratives as chains of causative events reflected on the scene in a media text. They reflect prearranged media outcomes biased towards a particular hegemony. In news stories, the disruption of equilibrium (“bad news”) or restoration of equilibrium (“good news”) is the predominant narrative elements. Prinsloo used a University of Cape Town (UCT) advert as an example. This had a picture of two vibrant young men dancing on a stage, one holding a microphone, with UCT’s arch and steps in the background. 'Some say success is about who you know,' says the first message, which is untidily arranged, but there is a reply below, in a tidy layout: 'We say it’s about where you go.' This is followed by information in point formant about qualifications that UCT offers. In relation with Todorov’s five stages, being worried about future is disrupting equilibrium, and choosing UCT is an attempt at restoration and graduation provides restoration.

In her paper “Culture and Communication” (1990) Ang argues that “cultural studies” is consciously broad:

It does not seek paradigmatic status, nor does it obey established disciplinary boundaries. Its intellectual loyalties reach beyond the walls of academe to the critique of current cultural issues in the broader sense… is about participating in an ongoing, open ended, politically oriented debate aimed at evaluating and producing critique on our contemporary cultural condition (P.240)

Ang looked how an audience interpreted a television text, the American prime-time soap opera, Dallas (1985). Her “reception analysis” looked at how people created their own meaning and culture, rather than passively absorbing prearranged meanings imposed upon them by broadcasting institutions. As an example, people viewed Dallas through different belief systems and personal interests.

Ang stressed that audiences were not just passive, quiet spectators, and that mass media’s power is real but not all-powerful. The works in Fourie (2007), like Wigston (2007), also show this. Wigston (2007) traced the history of media in South Africa, showing that the mainstream press was not able to satisfy many in the public. There was an alternative media that competed with it, especially in the 1980s, and media was also under pressure to adapt to audience demands, like more black readership and more interest in positive news (pp. 51-54).

In my PgDip class, each student had to share their experiences of media in relation with the readings we used during seminars. Students then had to bring an advert, whether from magazine, newspaper or television in class to analyse how its “representation” aspects such as features, colour and words or signs influenced meanings exchanged. This exercise helped us to identify denotation and connation and narrative stages in the media text. Third, there were presentations that involve looking at masculinity as symbolic aspect used to maintain hegemony. The presentations were from beer adverts to Toyota double cabs (cars), Ariel washing powder and Oreo biscuits. Invariably the products acted as the magic catalyst capable of making you happy and free. The beer and double cab were primarily associated with men and the remaining two with women, linking them as masculine (socialising, adventuring) and feminine (housework and child-rearing), respectively, and thus patriarchal and gendered approach. We picked up that fusions of city and rural life, in relation with anti-apartheid and youth codes are attached to modern culture, in relation with beer adverts: so people could identify with beer as part of their lives. The use of anti-apartheid and youth and relaxation moments helped to make people think drinking beer symbolises freedom and a better life. We (the class) unanimously concurred during presentations that such adverts reinforces patriarchal norms in a modernised form, and also showed how media is able to incorporate ideas that might seem at odds with the existing system (rebellion, anti-apartheid, the youth) into its system of signs.

Lastly, each student had to interview members of the public who read tabloid newspapers. These papers emerged in South Africa after 2000, and stress sensation, sex and “gore,” avoid politics and are aimed at the working class and poor (Wigston, 2007, p. 52). The research method involves some aspects in Ang’s analysis, the “ethnography of the audience.” We had to present the feedback in the class. The finding was that in Grahamstown (as in other places), poor and working class people prefer to read tabloids, especially the Daily Sun, because it reflects their day-to-day experiences, is affordable and interesting. The problem is that these papers often promote sexism and xenophobia and have low ethical standards (according to Wigston, 2007, p. 52). The progressive-alternative press is extremely weak at present, and the mainstream (quality) newspapers do not deal with the “labour and life” of the masses very much, and it’s tabloids (run by big capitalist firms) that take the space.

We also did peer interviews on how media had influenced our lives. The interviews interacted with readings related to the subject. There is not much research on the media consumption among the students here at Rhodes University, besides the work of Professor Larry Strelitz (like Strelitz, 2001).

We also had to do our own investigative journalism, and when we did this, we had to reflect on how the media works. My work was on waste pickers who live at the municipal dump in Grahamstown. It is called the Makana municipal landfill, because Grahamstown is part of Makana. I heard about the dump in the community newspaper, Grocott’s Mail. This experience led to me joining the Waste Pickers Movement.

I write more about it here.