New insights and old nonsense
Keith Windschuttle
Ecquid Novi, Journal for Journalism in Southern Africa
1998, Vol 19 (1)

In their replies to my paper, "The Poverty of Media Theory", (originally published Ecquid Novi, Journal for Journalism in Southern Africa, 1997, Vol 18, 1) both teams of Strelitz and Steenveld ("The fifth estate: Media theory the watchdog of journalism", Ecquid Novi, Vol 19, 1) and Tomaselli and Shepperson ("Cultural studies and theoretical impoverishment", Ecquid Novi, Vol 19, 1) refer to revelations to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the failure of journalists to report accurately on the events of the apartheid era. Journalists were unwittingly complicit in the political agenda of the government, they claim, and were constrained more by their own ideology than by apartheid legislation. Here is clear evidence, say Tomaselli and Shepperson, that journalism does little more than recover "the superficial, the literal" and the preferred meanings manufactured via the "mundaneness" of professional practice. Moreover, the faults of these journalists were not simply mistakes but necessary consequences of the same professional practice which, Tomaselli and Shepperson claim, concealed the "deeper meanings" the "symbolic associations" and "ongoing processes" that lurked beneath the surface of society at the time. Hence, both teams argue that my view that it is possible for journalism to report the world accurately must not only be wrong but naive in the extreme. However, they claim that thanks to the "new insights" provided by the field of cultural studies, journalists of the future can be trained to overcome the old deficiencies and ensure that the failures of the apartheid era do not recur.

This is all a great revelation to me. I had been under the impression that the information I had received from the news media about the South African regime from the 1960s to the 1980s had been reasonably accurate. Indeed, so convinced had I become of the veracity of these reports and the injustices they portrayed that I spent some considerable time in my youth doing what was possible in this country to oppose apartheid, especially helping to disrupt the visits of the Springbok rugby team and other sporting bodies. Moreover, there must have been millions of people in the world who gained the same picture as me, else how could the international boycott of the South African economy have ever been mounted, let alone been as successful as it eventually proved? Obviously, we could not have got our information from the "new insights" of cultural studies, since for most of the above period only a small number of people had ever heard of the subject. And I don't remember even one of the British Marxist media theorists so favoured by Strelitz and Steenveld, all of whom I have read, ever mentioning South Africa.

The truth is we were told what was happening by the news media. We saw television reports of the massacre at Sharpeville and of dogs and truncheons being used against demonstrators for many years after. Newspapers told us how the legal system in the country operated and showed us photographs of swimming beaches labelled "whites only". We read press reports of the death of activists like Steve Biko, reports that repeated both the police force's assertions of probity and the claims by his family and political colleagues of officially-sanctioned murder. We saw television interviews with liberals like Helen Suzman and Donald Woods and Christians like Desmond Tutu who denounced the regime, and we found them more credible than the interviews with its defenders. It is true that we saw very few members of the ANC interviewed, and to this extent the coverage was biased, but nonetheless the essential story still came through loud and clear. Indeed, like most Australians, I have never visited South Africa but I know more about it than I do of most of the countries of the world, thanks largely to journalists employed by newspapers, radio and television stations who have kept me informed over the past several decades.

All of this, I should emphasise, is quite consistent with the evidence to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that many South African journalists toed the government line over the same period. The claim that journalism is a pursuit of truth and an attempt to report what really happens is not refuted by the fact that many journalists often fail to achieve these goals. I do not simply argue, as Tomaselli and Shepperson assert, that "journalism … offers the literal truth". It is obvious to anyone that there are good and bad journalists just as there are good and bad scientists, doctors and historians. Many journalists have been exposed many times as being mistaken, opinionated and politically biased. But, until the rise of cultural studies, their critics usually felt obliged to show they were wrong about real things, that they used selective evidence, that they got their facts wrong, that they misinterpreted or were misled by their informants. In other words, genuine criticism of journalism has always operated on the assumption that truth is possible to attain, if the journalist does his job properly and gathers the appropriate evidence.

In contrast, cultural studies offers two different versions of truth, depending on the theoretical guru deferred to: (1) truth is an impossible notion deriving from out-of-date Enlightenment misconceptions that empirical methods of investigation have universal application -- this appears to be the version favoured by Tomaselli and Shepperson in their denunciation of the "positivist moment" in which I am purportedly located; or (2) there are many truths, and each culture, be it ethnic culture, indigenous culture, feminist culture, or class culture, produces its own, no matter how incompatible this might be with the "truths" of other cultures. Without boring the readers of Ecquid Novi beyond endurance by launching into a treatise in defence of the universality of Western empirical methods, or by demonstrating the self-contradiction inherent in both the above notions of truth, let me try to make a simple point. Despite the frequent failure of individual journalists to live up to the ideals of the profession, and despite the political bias displayed in the selection processes adopted by many editors in many countries, and even despite the success of some publications and programs that openly flout journalistic ethics and exploit the ignorance of their audiences, the traditional methods of news gathering and news reporting that have evolved within the industry since the invention of newspapers more than two hundred years ago, remain sound. If this was not so, how could I and millions of media consumers like me, have gained the view of apartheid, or any of the major political events of the world, that we have done?

Instead of blindly following the cultural studies movement, the main responsibilities of academics involved in journalism education should be to identify and classify journalism's traditional methods, to explain their benefits, to point out their shortcomings, and by a process of constructive criticism, to try to improve upon them. As I pointed out in my original paper, there have been journalists like Philip Knightley who, in his study of war reporting, have done exactly this. Cultural studies, on the other hand, is absolutely worthless for journalism education, as both replies to my paper unwittingly confirm. At best, the two replies make a couple of points that every journalist who has worked in the industry quickly recognises: there are commercial imperatives within which the publishing and broadcasting industries operate and these can sometimes conflict with professional ethics; and there are ideological and political pressures on journalists that should be recognised and overcome. All that cultural studies does with these familiar details, however, is express them in a mouth-full-of-marbles jargon that attempts to claim them as the property of the theory rather than a discovery that anyone of intelligence readily makes in practice. In short, both replies demonstrate the very faults that my original paper identified: a group of academics have set up an external body of theory that aims not to improve, nor to be constructively critical, but to condemn and expose the professional practice of journalism for (1) being superficial and mundane, (2) lending ideological support to power and authority, and (3) having a mistaken faith in its ability to be objective and report the truth about human affairs.

The two replies also confirm the historical outline I provided of the genesis and subsequent theoretical divergences made within media theory. Cultural studies, Strelitz and Steenveld acknowledge, originated in a version of Marxist structuralism that is hostile to the media industries because they are largely controlled by capitalist entrepreneurs. It will no doubt be a source of some embarrassment to Tomaselli and Shepperson to see that there are still such unreconstructed Marxists in their field, claiming the same mantle as themselves, and operating within such a pre-postmodernist time warp as to be still citing the major Marxist textbooks of the 1970s and early 80s as the principal sources of authority for their points.

On the other hand, the rambling reply by Tomaselli and Shepperson confirms my claim about the way cultural studies has now taken over the field of communications and how the writing of academics like John Hartley and his "seminal textbooks" have since replaced the original Marxism with a new body of postmodern theory. Though they claim that this theory fits the everyday experience of their students who live in the "increasingly indeterminate world of postmodern conditions" -- whatever that is supposed to mean -- Tomaselli and Shepperson are far more plausible when they agree with my own experience of student response, that is, many students regard this whole body of theory to be completely remote from the reality in which they are working: massive poverty, housing shortages, violence etc. Given this, it is an irresponsible waste of public money for universities to be funding courses of this nature.

There are some specific misinterpretations of my position in both replies that I would also like to correct.

1. Tomaselli and Shepperson accuse me of acting illegitimately in assuming the guise of objectivity and posing as a "disembodied individual", by referring to myself as "the author". Though I don't agree that the adoption of the third person actually has this effect, the fact is that I did not write this way. The editor of Ecquid Novi converted all first person references in my original paper to third person, without my approval. I do not know why he did this. Only tyrants and children refer to themselves in the third person.

2. Tomaselli and Shepperson claim I fail to recognise the "crucial role" played by Stuart Hall in using the theories of the pre-war Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, to move cultural studies beyond the theories of the French Communist, Louis Althusser. In fact, I specifically discussed Hall's use of Gramsci on page 9 of the Ecquid Novi edition. Unlike Tomaselli and Shepperson, however, I do not regard the switch from one defunct Marxist theorist to another as any kind of intellectual advance.

3. For people who profess concern over the use of ad hominem censure, Tomaselli and Shepperson are remarkably free with it themselves, especially when they describe me as "somewhat ranting" in my comments about Foucault, Derrida and Althusser. To "rant" is to engage in a form of bombast or "empty speechifying" but Tomaselli and Shepperson do not offer one argument to indicate that this is what I have done. In other words, it is they, not me, who descend to ad hominem abuse, and they have plainly done this, moreover, as a cheap way of avoiding my discussion about those French writers who have provided the theoretical foundations of the field they profess.

4. Strelitz and Steenveld claim the basic flaw of my paper is that I am operating with an empirical epistemology rather than, like them, a realist epistemology. This is a good example of the blunders regularly made by cultural studies academics when they try to discuss concepts derived from philosophy, in which most have never been educated apart from picking up a smattering of jargon in literary theory classes. Strelitz and Steenveld, it is plain, do not know the difference between an epistemology and an ontology. Let me make some elementary points which all first year philosophy students know and which can be readily confirmed by any dictionary of philosophy. Realism is not an epistemology (that is, a theory of how we come to know things), rather, it is an ontology (a theory of what exists). Realism is the view that there is a real world that exists quite independent of human perceptions, that is, that material things exist even when they are not being perceived. Its most common opponent has been idealism, the view that things exist only as objects of perception or, in the version favoured by postmodernism, as objects of conceptual and linguistic lenses of our own making. The passage Strelitz and Steenveld quote from Graham Turner -- "What language does is to construct, not label, reality for us" -- is a statement that expresses an idealist ontology, and to call it "realist" and to regard it as part of an "epistemology", as they do, indicates they do not have a clue what they are talking about.

5. The claim by Strelitz and Steenveld that it is just as factually correct to call Louis Althusser by their preferred description, "the eminent French philosopher", as to use my words, "the French Communist Party theorist", demonstrates they are also having some problems with the terms "fact" and "correct". In Althusser's case, the word "eminent" is not a factual description but a value judgement. To be an eminent philosopher, he would have needed to have made a valuable contribution to the field of philosophy and to be accorded an appropriate degree of respect by philosophers. Since neither of these conditions has ever obtained, to call him eminent is an abuse of language. On the other hand, every thing I said about him was true, not only the phrase objected to but the fact that he was a Stalinist who supported the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who murdered his wife and was declared criminally insane. It is most surprising to find he still has defenders among South African media theory academics. Or, on second thoughts, given the intellectual expertise demonstrated above by Strelitz and Steenveld, perhaps it is not so surprising.

6. Strelitz and Steenveld accuse me of making a grammatical mistake in the phrase "none of these principles are upheld", and indicate that the verb should be singular. If true, this would indeed be embarrassing because the phrase occurs just as I argue that one of the roles of journalism education is to instil correct grammatical practice in students. However, it is they who have, yet again, made the mistake. My two reference works for English expression are Stephen Murray-Smith's Right Words: A Guide to English Usage in Australia, and The Penguin Working Words: An Australian Guide to Modern English Usage. Both derive from Fowler and both agree that my usage is correct: "It is a mistaken belief that the pronoun 'none' must always be singular," Murray-Smith says. "Many assume that, because the word 'none' is claimed, not altogether correctly, to be a contraction of 'no one' or 'not one', it must be followed by a singular verb: 'none has'. In fact, the plural construction is more common." Whatever it is that Strelitz and Steenveld teach at Rhodes University, for the sake of their students I hope it is not English grammar.