World Press Freedom Day might be the appropriate occasion to remember a few home truths about media which sometimes get lost in donor efforts to use journalists for their own developmental agendas. This instrumentalisation of media is just a very bad idea! Yet it is done all the time, with the best intentions, of course. Let’s start with three widely shared assumptions on the role of media in Africa – and elsewhere:

• They are “watchdog, agenda setter and gatekeeper in the public forum” (as Pippa Norris call them in her book “Public Sentinel”, issuu.com/world.bank.publications/docs/9780821382004)

• They are of central importance to any good governance approach (as the UNESCO and the World Bank keep stressing)

• They are the bellwether of democracy (no fair election without free media) [more]

Julius Malema is the bête noire of South African politics. He would, of course, call this description “racist”, put forward by a “bastard” with a “white tendency” and an “agent” of imperialism. At least, that is what the president of the African National Congress Youth League recently called a white BBC-journalist who had dared to ask a pointed question during a press conference at Luthuli House, the headquarter of the ANC in Pretoria. Welcome to the ongoing slinging match between South Africa’s leading populist and the press. It is an intriguing match – and an emblematic conflict about the trials and tribulations of the young democracy 16 years after the end of Apartheid. [more]

I returned to South Africa two weeks ago after a six-month hiatus in Canada. Within days, national and international media sported headlines of Julius Malema, the leader of the ANC Youth League, and his inappropriate singing of "kill the Boer." Just days later, Eugene Terreblance, leader of Afrikaner Resistance Movement, well known supporter of the Apartheid regime and advocate for an all-white South Africa, was killed on his farm by two of his black workers. The two events coupled together created a media frenzy of statements that South Africa is imploding, that racism is rampant, and that the country is no better than it was under Apartheid. Columnists have predicted retributive killings on both sides. I received calls and e-mails from friends and family worried that I was trapped in the midst of bloody warfare, asking if I felt safe, positing that the "situation must be tense." When I met with two friends from Europe over the weekend, one asked me-in all honesty and sincerity-if I thought there could be "racial warfare" in the coming months and years. My first instinct was to blame these overly simplified statements and concerns on the people who voiced them, assuming they weren't well read and were coming from dated notions that Africa is a backwards, violent continent, where anything goes. But as I read more news from the West, it became clear to me that the international media had done such a poor job of depicting the Malema and Terreblance events that it was no wonder those outside thought that the country was going to hell in a hand-basket. [more]

On March 24, I received an e-mail from a close friend under the intriguing subject “What...?” On opening the e-mail, I discovered my friend was not impressed by two articles in that morning’s newspapers condemning the government’s recent proposal to amend the press law and introduce new restrictions on the publication of newspapers.“What is all the drama journalists are acting out in the papers about the proposed amendments to Wawawa Bill?” my friend wrote in the email. Wawawa is slang for journalists at my social club. He went on to ask me what was wrong with an amendment that would involve:[more]