The rise and rise of community media

“Somebody - was it Burke? - called journalism the fourth estate.

“That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three.

“The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it.”

It is with those wise words by Oscar Wilde, that I find it necessary to begin this short reflection on the need to give credit to whom it is due. This is particularly important in an era when – in Nigeria, South Africa, the United States, and everywhere else – opposition politics, let alone any form of “good” politics, is dead.

Community newspapers (and I refer here to serious-minded ones) are fast emerging as the last hope of the electorate and becoming, in a very real sense, the “only estate of the realm.”

I have followed for quite some time the civic exploits of Daily Dispatch, the major newspaper in East London (South Africa). I have come to the conclusion that without this newspaper, the citizens would have been left completely helpless in the face of municipal misgovernance.

Two initiatives are worthy of note, namely “Dispatch Dialogues” and “Dispatch Civic”. The two, in combination, make the newspaper a space in which citizens, but particularly ordinary people, find their voice.

Having attended several sessions of the Dispatch Dialogues, which incidentally is a joint initiative of the Daily Dispatch and University of Fort Hare’s Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, I can personally attest to the crucial importance of having newspapers take up the space which the death of opposition politics has created in most countries. I return to this crisis of oppositional politics shortly.

The dialogues are civic events and take place fortnightly at “normal” venues such as the city theatre, university lecture halls and community centres – in East London and the surrounding towns. Scholars, researchers, community leaders, activists and politicians are invited to speak on a given subject, often a subject that touches on societal renewal, politics, environment, gender or racial issues, service delivery, or one aspect or another of governance.

Due to wide publicity, and because it takes place in the evening, each dialogue attracts a large representation from members of the community. The format is that community members engage the speaker as openly as they possibly can, which makes each dialogue a very lively event. Issues raised in the dialogues often become major news items in the following morning’s edition of the newspaper. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Dispatch Dialogues is one space local politicians watch very closely.

Dispatch Civic, which was launched only this year, is more narrowly focused. It has its own team, a dedicated telephone line, and an email address. It is a series of face-to-face meetings between the Civic team and the community. The meetings take place in coffee shops, primary school grounds, on the beach and wherever else the Civic team feels it can freely gauge people’s feelings on a range of issues pertaining to municipal governance.

In the last few months, Dispatch Civic has brought to the attention of Daily Dispatch readers, local communities and the government issues such as municipal refuse collection failures, infrastructure deprivation in poor communities, and unkempt urban parks. It has also alerted the government and readers to the crime problem, the unfriendliness of urban infrastructure to people with physical disabilities, and the ageing signage in some suburbs.

Modest as these media-driven community engagement initiatives, they seem to have emerged as the only barometer that the municipal authorities have to gauge public satisfaction, or outrage, at their performance. In many cases, they have responded with unusual speed and efficiency to citizen queries and demands made at these civic engagements. In a sense, if East London – and the broader Buffalo City – has not been well run, things would probably have been worse without these initiatives.

The initiatives have worked for the benefit of citizens mainly because, in East London (as in the rest of South Africa), government officials and politicians would do anything to avoid negative media attention, and newspapers in particular seem to have capitalised on this crucial phobia to keep them on their toes. Herein lies the reason for the rise of community media in the country. They serve the community in ways no parliament and no opposition political formation can ever hope to rival.

But there lies the irony.

In country after country, parliamentarians have virtually nothing to offer those they supposedly represent, other than interminable squabbling and street fights. Political party chieftains remain trapped in self-serving schemes over who takes power next. Institutionalised politics has left us all in the cold.

Political opposition, historically seen as a vital check against the complacency of incumbency, has become more or less a drag on our collective desire for progress. In societies where it exists in reality – and there are many in which it exists in name only – it receives nothing but the perpetual snub of the incumbent.

The “government-in-waiting” image of major opposition parties deprives these parties of any ability to become “parties of engagement” – the role that the electorate perhaps demand of them. Opposition parties are regarded as foes by the incumbents. Their ideas are seen as undermining. Their “alternative programmes” are seen as schemes to swing votes at the next elections. Worst, while allegations of political scheming as typically levelled by incumbents against opposition parties are themselves part of the recalcitrant, “do nothing, achieve nothing” mindset of incumbency, many of the oppositional political tactics we read about are useless. There is neither sincerity nor depth in the “attack” politics of opposition. Often, it is as though politicians in the opposition bench in parliament only speak up as a way of earning their pay.

Which is why no one should be surprised that some countries have no opposition political parties! Everyone is in politics for the “big break”, to “eat”, rather than to “oppose”. And which is why, thankfully, when the chips are down, society itself – but particularly the media and civil society formations – steps up to the challenge.

It is sad but true: every school child knows that “the Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it.” Every form of “good” politics, is dead.

But then, how utterly helpless we would all have been without the modest, but brave, civic initiatives of our community media!