I am at somewhat of a turning point in my work as a writer and political economist, concerned as I am mainly with global matters. It feels a bit like that instant when you pour scalding hot water into a crystal flute ― just before thermal shock causes a shattering.
This sense of foreboding might have to do with having read too much 19th century Russian literature, or it has to do with real constraints and limitations on intellectual work and that which is presented as “common sense”.
I should take a step back. More than 30 years ago I decided to take a break from journalism. I had reached a high point in my career. I was the national political correspondent for the Sowetan, the biggest newspaper in the country at the time (by circulation and readership). I was based in the press gallery of the last apartheid parliament.
It was in the press gallery where I learnt, astonishingly, that the difference between right and wrong in South African politics was the difference between the National Party and the Democratic Party. Contiguously, the difference between global right and wrong was between positions held by the Republicans and the Democrats in the US, how that shaped Washington’s foreign policy and, by extension, determined agenda setting in the South African press.
I remember now, as I write, a somewhat gushing review of Chester Crocker’s High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace in a Rough Neighbourhood. Crocker was the hero of High Noon, the classical “American Western” of 1952, when Henry Luce’s “American Century” began to take shape.
So, I decided in the early 1990s that there was a bigger world, one that lies beyond the simple framing of right and wrong, and presenting the world commonsensically. I reflected at the time on the way editors and journalist that ran publishing houses in the early Nazi-era may not have had the state peering over their shoulders but simply knew “the right thing to do” if they wanted to stay in business.
While the world did open up over the next several decades, at least for me, it is disconcerting that there has been something of a closing down, especially over the past 10-15 years, at about the time Western oligarchy began to emerge as a global force.
My initial appraisal did not stem from some radical left-wing position, a position for which I do not apologise, but from Gilbert Chesterton (an English Christian apologist) who wrote about journalists being dishonest and timid while working in a craft that was a dead thing floating down a stream.
While the world did open up over the next several decades, at least for me, it is disconcerting that there has been something of a closing down, especially over the past 10-15 years, at about the time Western oligarchy began to emerge as a global force. Let’s face it, the Russian oligarchs of the early 1990s never did leave their imprimatur on the global political economy.
Oligarchical control
It’s probably safer to use an example of oligarchical control in Europe, where evidence shows how a group of oligarchs bought and owned “everything in the country, starting with the mainstream media even to the local level — local newspapers, regional newspapers, basically everything”, said Marius Dragomir, director of the Budapest-based Centre for Media, Data & Society in 2018.
It seems clearer now that most South African media, since I first was a junior reporter and photographer in the early 1980s to my time in the press gallery in the early 1990s, use the North Atlantic Community as the backdrop of everything, through patterns of ownership, with attendant constellations of power that conspire to shape and determine what is “the right thing to do”.
The world is big, to be sure, but journalism as we have come to know it has shrunk even further since that period when I decided to go on some kind of merantau. In this third decade of the 21st century old positions have reossified and any deviators have to be disciplined and punished; by-words for “sanctioned” and “silenced”. It’s hard to see a way back.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.