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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, NOVEMBER 22, 1985
PAGE 9
manner. He rationalises, he gives some kind of meaning to
events. He also interposes between the action and the reader
the civilising barrier of words•••• Television, by contrast,
does not need words or shape or meaning•••• There is a grow
ing tendency of television news bulletins•••especially when
covering riots, simply to let the film run, after a brief
introduction, and tell its own tale, the only sound being the
shouts of rioters, the noise of missiles being hurled, police
bullets or sirens and the incidental cacophony of
destruction••••
The third reason is that television has a much stronger
inherent tendency than print journalism to distort or even
fake violent events. For many years now•••the organisers of
demonstrations likely or deliberately calculated to end in
violent conflicts with the police, have worked closely with
television•••to convey to the public a sense of growing
crisis, which may be wholly artificial.
The television
networks want violent real action to grab viewers and raise
ratings.
So both parties have a common interest in the
breakdown of order.... Television is a gigantic magni fying
glass which focuses and concentrates the spark of violence
and conjures it into a fire.
There is a further dishonesty in the particular case of South
Africa. Many people involved in the television coverage of
events there are partisan opponents of the country's
political system and wish it to be overthrown. They believe
that media coverage can help to do this. In other words,
their primary interest is not reporting the news, but making
it. Of course to some extent journalists have always done
this•••• It is a question of scale and degree. The selective
and biased coverage of South Africa has now gone beyond all
bounds. It amounts in effect to� attempted media putsch.
This is not the first such medi a intervention.
Richard
Nixon, for instance, was the victim of a media putsch,
coordinated, if it was not actually planned, by elements in
the U.S. press and television who were determined to reverse
the verdict of the 1972 election and who used their vast
media power--in many respects monopoly power--to destroy a
president••••
In South Africa, the television lights have been turned off, at least
for now. But much damage has been done. The news media played right
into the hands of the radical African National Congress, which vowed to
make the townships ungovernable.
(The ANC continues to broadcast
exhortations by radio from Marxist Ethiopi a such as:
"Police and
soldiers must be killed even when they are in their homes. Forward to
the people's war.") By means of the media-exaggerated violence and the
resultant police crackdowns, A whole generation of youths in ,Yt! town
ships have been radicalized--down to 4-year-olds who know how to make
Molotov cocktails! These youths are now the shock troops of the future
real revolution the ANC hopes to ride to victory.