Times are tough at media operations. They’re tough at Independent Media, where 128 staff have been laid off, and they’re tough at Arena Holdings, the company that owns Business Day, where a retrenchment process is also under way.
This is obviously worrying to people like me who work in media, but it should also concern anyone who is interested in the truth. We live in dangerous times and the need for edited spaces is more profound than ever.
This is a point I made at the Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation’s annual Inclusive Growth Summit three weeks ago. During my short address, I described the summit as an “edited space” — because it was by invitation only — and one in which it was safe to propose ideas and disagree in a civil and constructive manner.
I said that we needed to take this idea of continuing to have constructive conversations in edited spaces out into the country, and that newspapers (and our websites and TV stations, but please excuse me for using the shorthand “newspapers”) are places where these constructive debates should continue.
Almost to prove the point, when I described myself as “the editor of a liberal newspaper”, I was approached afterwards by two highly respected people who described it as a “brave” thing to say. This was interesting because when I said it, I didn’t feel any hostility from the audience or that I had said anything particularly radical. On social media — an unedited space — I would likely have come under attack for identifying myself as something so unfashionable as a liberal.
Edited spaces are, in reality, safe spaces because they remove those who peddle lies, those who engage in bad faith and those who are not interested in seeking the truth. That’s the work of editing.
I told the audience that the role of an editor is to encourage honest debate and that we encourage our readers to challenge views presented in the paper in the letters column or on our OpEd pages. “When we get things wrong or say something people disagree with in an editorial, hit back and tell us!” There was a murmur of surprise in the room. That worries me because it shows that somehow newspapers have managed to allow a sense to develop that we are an unassailable edifice, that we are exclusionary and arrogant, and jealously guard the sanctity of our opinion spaces for those we agree with.
It’s just so completely wrong. I disagree with plenty of what we publish in this newspaper. I have deliberately sought out columnists to write stuff I don’t agree with and to challenge people who are too comfortable with dominant narratives in spaces such as economics and energy. I get quite a lot of flak in the background when I do this. People reveal their lack of commitment to debate when confronted with opinions they don’t like, but that’s okay — I’m doing my job of ensuring that there is contestation in areas where some people have a very entitled sense of ownership.
I’ve been thinking a bit about something called pluralistic ignorance which, according to researchers in the 1980s, described the phenomenon in which people perceive incorrectly that they hold a minority view on a particular topic, that everyone else disagrees with them, and that therefore they generally go along with the group behaviour and keep quiet about their actual opinions.
This phenomenon is made worse on social media. So much modern dialogue is driven by social media algorithms that prioritise engagement, the rocket fuel of the attention economy, and therefore give prominence to views that are hateful and extreme (“from the river to the sea”), false dichotomies (“black lives matter” versus “all lives matter”), that it can seem overwhelming. Anyone who thinks, quietly, that Israel and Palestine need to coexist, or that indeed black lives matter precisely because all lives matter and that the historical crime is that neither was true, just keeps their heads down and gets on with their day.
But it’s not good, because not only are algorithms designed to feed you what upsets you, bad actors take advantage of this. Social media is awash with disinformation and lies, now augmented with AI imagery and sound, and tightly targeted by those who benefit from discord. When sturdy news organisations such as the New York Times fall afoul of fake news around Israel’s bombing of a hospital in Gaza, for example, with all its standards in place, the rest of us are genuinely vulnerable.
That brings me back to the idea of edited spaces and the need for more people to take more deliberate ownership of them. The almost wholly divisive discourse around the Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli civilians and Israel’s merciless response has brought it home. There has been so little recourse to actual principle that I’ve found the whole unedited debate mind-boggling.
If attacks on civilians are appalling, then surely they are always appalling, and the one-sidedness of so much of what I have seen has left me feeling hopeless. I can’t improve on Simon Kuper’s observation in the Financial Times that “if you only care about war crimes when one side commits them, then you don’t really care about war crimes”.
What it reveals is that some commentators, politicians and entire governments — including ours — picked their side in the Middle East long before Hamas’ attack and Israel’s response, and these people are more than willing to clamber over convenient new corpses to shout old slogans over the barricades. They have absolutely no foundation in principle, and thinking people are left with little option but to dismiss the hyperbole and rampant rhetorical inflation as symptomatic of something else. It is the “something else” that is interesting.
Last week this newspaper published an opinion piece by the Israeli ambassador. We have carried opinion from columnists unequivocal in their condemnation of Israel. I have come under fire — some of it quite unpleasant — for both. Edited spaces aren’t easy, but we have to occupy them. That’s the whole point. Let’s keep it going and get off social which is, in a sporting analogy, the referee that wants both sides to lose and the tournament to be ruined for all.
• Parker is Business Day editor-in-chief.
