CMP Reflection

By: Khatija Nxedlana and Catherine Deiner

The Journalism, Development and Democracy (JDD) course with a strong emphasis on Tanni Haas’s theory of public journalism created an introduction to the task we would be tackling for the second-half of the year. Moving away from mainstream forms of journalism which are typically top-down in structure, favouring the views of a minority elite group instead of the majority of ordinary citizens. The traditional form of journalism sees the journalists as the professionals, the watchdogs over the submissive television viewers, radio listeners and newspaper readers who are passive consumers of the media product. Instead, journalists should strive to encourage participation from citizens; they should act as observers immersing themselves into a community to find issues of concern to the people. Journalists should include or give control to ordinary people in the setting of a public agenda or philosophy. Journalists should only step in if the agenda set by the public is undemocratic.
We set out to achieve community involvement in journalism. This was done in order for ordinary members of the community to be active instead of passive decision makers in the field of journalism. The sound-slide we (Catherine and Khatija) produced falls in line with the aims of development journalism. We, as a larger group, went out into Ward 8 and held a public meeting to hear the concerns of the community. A recurring theme was one of emptiness and the lack of resources for the youth. We therefore set out to address this concern and from the beginning of the process we wanted to ensure that we contributed to the community and didn’t exploit the people living in the wards assigned to us. This was especially important to us. Through a combination of audio and images we focused on a local artist in the ward, Thembelani Fene who makes shoes to survive. The entire piece was in English aimed at our audience, being the council and the Centre for Social Development. Fene makes use of off-cuts and scrap materials, some of which he gets from the one shop he sells his goods to: Under The Arch. Fene’s craft is an indication of a member of the community finding ways to help himself. Not to say that he doesn’t need assistance from the council or social development but he has chosen not to sit around doing nothing which is what development journalism is all about, the community helping themselves. Fene is an active member of Ward 8 and he was one of our connectors and catalyst in organising the soccer tournament that we hosted as a group.
What we noticed was that, those with the capacity to help out in the community, such as municipal workers, do not. Our audience for Thembelani’s story was the member from Social Development from ward 8, the Ward Councillor, councillors from the Cacadu Grahamstown Department of Arts and Culture and a member from the Unemployment People’s Movement. All proved very difficult to get a hold of which forced us to make slight changes to our project. Generally, people were reluctant to speak which made it difficult in getting feedback for the piece and for helping Thembelani develop his skill as a craftsman as we had hoped to do. The experts we were to use in our story were not to detract from the development angel but rather to seek assistance from them so as to help a struggling member of the community.
From our first group meeting, we had unanimously decided that, should a theme come up in which we could show the community that they can come up with a solution to their own problems, we would facilitate this. As one of the recurring topics raised at our public meeting was that the youth have no recreational activities; our group as a whole organised a soccer tournament between wards seven and eight, for the children. This took place on the morning of Saturday, the 2nd October. We feel that hosting this soccer tournament went a huge way in showing the community that we were not there to exploit them but rather to facilitate communication between them to find solutions. It was a huge success. We got very positive feedback from this event. More than 100 children participated in the event and their responses at smaller focus groups held on the day gave all of us a fuzzy feeling. We think that this event made the sceptics of public journalism realise the benefits from this process.
This was to show community members and journalism students that journalists can interact and engage with the community. To fight the stereotype that journalists are far removed and only strive for objectivity, as professional outsiders, valuing expert opinions, looking in on the helpless ordinary people. It was a grass-roots initiative, organised by the members of wards seven and eight, Fene being instrumental in organising teams from Ward 8. Our role was to ensure the smooth running of the event, organise sponsors for gifts to give to the winning teams as well as food for the teams in hopes that the wards would continue a new tradition of Soccer Saturdays. In this way we were independent from commercial, governmental and other editorial movements. We only gained through this process. We helped the community to realise that although there are problems within their wards which they cannot solve without help from political-economic groups, there are community-based solutions to certain issues. It is hoped that the communities will advance this citizen-generated solution to one of the problems in the wards.
What we have learnt from this is a realisation of a quote from first year, “Everyone has a story”. All the concepts we learnt in the JDD part of the course have been actualised through the various mediums. By providing an open platform for citizens to communicate, they too need to share their individual opinions as well as allowing others the opportunity to do so, also known as “ideal role-taking” as said by Habermas. This very much falls in line with two of the normative theories proposed by Christians of the media’s role in a democracy. These are the Collaborative role and the Facilitative role.
As a big group we had to ensure that all our work constantly followed the same theme so as to keep the consistency we had spoken about in the beginning of the process. We checked each other’s work, critiqued each other and gave constructive criticism.