Media Creation

For nearly two years South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and its media have been inseparable. At a recent workshop with journalists in Johannesburg, TRC Deputy Chairperson Alex Boraine said: "The TRC owes a huge debt to the media of South Africa. Without coverage in newspapers and magazines and without the account of proceedings on TV screens and without the voice of the TRC being beamed through radio across the land, its work would be disadvantaged and immeasurably poorer."

Boraine's expression of appreciation hides just how complex the relationship between the media and the TRC has been. It's true that because of the media this strange social experiment - a hybrid of knowledge, justice and healing on the grandest scale, unprecedented among other troubled nations of the world - became a daily part of our lives. At one stage it was a distinct possibility that all the hearings would be secret. When the Standing Committee of Parliament was debating the issue, political parties opted for secrecy but 23 NGOs intervened and appealed for public knowledge.

In the beginning the two TRC functions sounded so simple - deliver truth and reconciliation - and were linked through the Biblical injunction so often repeated in TRC circles, "you shall know the truth and the truth will set you free." The task of uncovering the truth has an easy synergy with traditional journalism. I can't think of a single journalist two years ago who didn't look forward to the hearings, to the pieces of the puzzle coming together and creating a whole. Many journalists who undertook investigative forays into the human rights abuses under apartheid have found themselves justified and vindicated as more and more information becomes available.

But the task of reconciliation is outside traditional definitions of journalism. As it became increasingly clear that the commission would not have the time, personnel or experience to deliver on this one, the commissioners began to pressurise journalists to take on board this function too. Journalist and TRC commissioner Hugh Lewin, speaking at a workshop organised by the Media Peace Centre in Cape Town in January, said: "The TRC won't deliver reconciliation, but it has put it on the national agenda. The challenge is to journalists to be the first to pick up the baton and take the work forward."

In handling this second part of the TRC brief, at first journalists did what they always do: report from the sidelines. They told the stories, they showed people crying and finding healing and forgiving. There was a simple assumption (by both reporters and commissioners) that this simple relaying via broadcasting would reach the majority of South Africans, involve them in the process, and through fellow-feeling they too would know the truth and be set free of the horrendous past.

But as the process has unfolded, journalists have found themselves being pulled into the events being covered. Some were victims of human rights abuses themselves, some were perpetrators; some found themselves implicated as part of the group who benefited from apartheid. Some just found the "endless repetition of horror" (to quote Lewin again) psychologically overwhelming.

Furthermore, it became important to hold special hearings on the behaviour of the media because it became clear that gross human rights violations grow in a climate encouraged by abuse of the power to disseminate information and formulate frameworks for people to view the world and its events. 'Truth' depends not so much on objective fact as on who you are and what ideology motivates your understanding of the events around you. This is true not just of the perpetrators who come to make full confessions in order to get amnesty, but also of the way those events were reported in the past and the way they're being covered today. Witness the very different versions of the same events testified to by English-speaking, Afrikaans-speaking and black journalists at the recent TRC media hearings.

So the TRC, unwittingly, has thrown up some very stiff challenges to journalism in South Africa. Firstly, it is difficult to stand on the sidelines when the media hearings show very clearly that those in power in the media were strongly influenced by the National Party 'total onslaught' propaganda. Journalists are not just witnesses, they are victims and perpetrators too. As one signatory to the document by 127 Afrikaans reporters presented to the TRC said to me: "I was not a good enough journalist during the '80s."

Secondly, what is 'truth' when multiple stories about the same event do not cohere into a whole? Simple reportage is challenged to engage with ideology, psychology, culture and experience when confronted with this problem. Again the TRC media hearings showed this aspect up starkly when journalists themselves demonstrated how fragmented their memories of the same past can be. South African Union of Journalists (SAUJ) President Sam Sole said: "There is a lack of a common intellectual framework for what we do as journalists. We are victims of our violent history and the denegration of intellectual activity."

Thirdly, simple dualisms like 'victim'/'perpetrator' do not describe the world adequately when many 'victims' are agents fighting and suffering willingly and when 'perpetrators' are not just the torturers but the judges, lawyers, doctors, managers and even the ignorant masses who condoned the acts by their unwillingness to get involved. Journalist Tony Weaver pointed out at the Cape Town workshop that the real object of reconciliation in South Africa is not victims with perpetrators but victims with the beneficiaries of the apartheid system. Both the TRC and the media have been guilty of seeking out those who fit into these two neat categories so that the story is easy to relate and fits a neat guilty-innocent dichotomy.

Fourthly, although evil has a human face - many human faces - we still haven't come to terms with structurally how pervasive 'the system' was. The hearings have focused powerfully on those names we all know. Reportage has also treated these hearings as big events worth personnel and time. But the reality is that these people are just the arms and legs of a much larger body of people - the millions and millions turned by apartheid legislation into non-humans.

There is no doubt in my mind - and this is borne out by discussions with a group of news editors from Independent Newspapers who recently did a two-week training course at Rhodes University - that when the commission shuts up shop, so will the journalists. Those placed specially on TRC beats will be reallocated. Not many editors will think seriously about continuing lengthy and expensive investigations that might unearth those stories the TRC never got to. The TRC Special Report will finally say good night. I can see that as we enter the debate about reparations, the media will resort to its old-fashioned method of blow-by-blow reporting.

It looks like a sum of billions is going to be required to compensate those who came forward to the TRC - and this will require the cooperation of taxpayers. A conflict just waits to happen. Proactive journalism would start paving the way for the beneficiaries of apartheid to do something concrete about 40 years of injustice in their name. Just as paying for the elections that ushered in our democracy won general acceptance, this next stage in the national reconciliation process needs the same sensitivity and planning.

Emotions about the TRC are now very mixed. Among journalists, few believe that is has been an unqualified success, especially the blunder of placing the process of amnesty before the process of reparation. Few reporters covering the process believe that reconciliation is easy and flows from just finding out things. But the paradox is that the TRC has probably been the single most important challenge to journalism in this country. The number of workshops and seminars on the issue just this year show that those covering the TRC are thinking deeply about what all this means, not just for this country but for this profession. Immediately it means that journalists have begun to take seriously that "reflecting complexity" (in the words of Stephen Laufer of Business Day) is a very important task. At another level it means they have begun to understand that journalists do affect the events they report on. Maybe journalistic objectivity - which as anthropologist Pamela Reynolds points out, "was used against truth" in the past - can be abandoned for a more situated, self-knowing, responsible form of reporting.

I'm not entertaining hopes that South African journalism has done a major shift as a result of the TRC. But the debates and discussions going on suggest that many people in the profession are signalling a distinct unhappiness with the inadequacies of traditional journalism to get at the stories that need to be told for today.

Anthea Garman is a senior lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University.

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