When Nelson Mandela was a dedicated freedom-fighter against
white-ruled South Africa, he was almost as much a “non-person” in the
U.S. media as he was in South Africa’s press. Only after Mandela pulled
back from demands about redistributing wealth was he embraced as a mass
media icon, Danny Schechter reports.
By Danny Schechter
There’s anger amidst the apprehension in South Africa as the numbers
of “journalists” on the Mandela deathwatch grows. Members of his family
have about had it, comparing what even the New York Times called a
“media swarm” to African vultures that wait to pounce on the carcasses
of dead animals.
President Barack Obama was soon in South Africa, carrying a message
that he hyped as one of “profound gratitude” to Nelson Mandela. The
Times reported, “Mr. Obama said the main message he intended to deliver
to Mr. Mandela, ‘if not directly to him but to his family, is simply our
profound gratitude for his leadership all these years and that the
thoughts and prayers of the American people are with him, and his
family, and his country.’”
It doesn’t seem as if the South Africa’s grieving for their former
president’s imminent demise are too impressed with Obama seeking the
spotlight. Some groups including top unions protested his receiving an
honorary degree from a university in Johannesburg.
Interestingly, NBC with its team buttressed by former South African
correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault did not bother to cover the protest
but relied on Reuters reporting “nearly 1,000 trade unionists, Muslim
activists, South African Communist Party members and others marched to
the U.S. Embassy where they burned a U.S. flag, calling Obama’s foreign
policy ‘arrogant and oppressive.’”
“We had expectations of America’s first black president. Knowing
Africa’s history, we expected more,” Khomotso Makola, a 19-year-old law
student, told Reuters. He said Obama was a “disappointment, I think
Mandela too would be disappointed and feel let down.”
Reuters reported, “South African critics of Obama have focused in
particular on his support for U.S. drone strikes overseas, which they
say have killed hundreds of innocent civilians, and his failure to
deliver on a pledge to close the U.S. military detention center at
Guantanamo Bay in Cuba housing terrorism suspects.”
(Oddly, The South African police detained a local cameraman who used
his own drone to photograph the hospital from above. He was stopped for
“security” reasons.)
For symbolic reasons, as well as because of his global popularity,
Nelson Mandela seems to be of special interest to the American media
with the networks, nominally in an austerity mode, busting their budgets
to have a dominant presence.
South African skeptic Rian Malan writes in the Spectator, “Every time
Mandela goes into hospital, large numbers of Americans (up to 50) are
flown here to take up their positions, and the South African network is
similarly activated. Colin, (a cameraman who works for a U.S. network)
for instance, travels to Johannesburg, hires a car and checks into a
hotel, all on the network’s ticket. Since last December, he’s probably
spent close to 30 days (at $2000 a day, expenses included) cooling his
heels at various poolsides. And he has yet to shoot a single frame.
“As Colin says, this could be the worst disaster in American media
history, inter alia because all these delays are destroying the story.
When the old man finally dies, a lot of punters are going to yawn and
say, Mandela died? Didn’t that already happen a year ago?”
Hostility to the media is satirized in an open letter by Richard
Poplak from the foreign media to South Africa that appears in The Daily
Maverick:
“As you may have noted, we’re back! It’s been four long months since
the Oscar Pistorius bail hearing thing, and just as we were forgetting
just how crappy the Internet connections are in Johannestoria, the
Mandela story breaks.
“We feel that it is vital locals understand just how big a deal this
is for us. In the real world — far away from your sleepy backwater —
news works on a 24-hour cycle. That single shot of a hospital with
people occasionally going into and out of the front door, while a
reporter describes exactly what is happening—at length and in detail?
That’s our bread and butter. It’s what we do. And you need to get out of
the way while we do it.”
Why all the fanatical interest? The U.S. media loves larger-than-life
personalities, often creating them when they don’t exist. Mandela has
assumed the heroic mantle for them of Martin Luther King Jr. whose
memory enjoys iconic status even as his achievements like Voting Rights
Act was just picked apart by right-wing judicial buzzards in black
robes. (King’s image was also sanitized with his international outlook
often muzzled).
The current homage to Mandela wasn’t always like this. For many
years, the U.S. media treated Mandela as a communist and terrorist,
respecting South African censorship laws that kept his image secret.
Reports about the CIA’s role in capturing him were few and far between.
Ditto for evidence of U.S. spying documented in cables released by
Wikileaks.
In the Reagan years, Mandela’s law partner Oliver Tambo, then the
leader of the ANC while Mandela was in prison, was barred from coming to
the U.S. and then, when he did, meeting with top officials. Later, Rep.
Dick Cheney, R-Wyoming, refused to support a congressional call for
Mandela’s release from jail.
In 1988, I, among other TV producers, launched the TV series “South
Africa Now” to cover the unrest the networks were largely ignoring as
stories shot by U.S. crews ended up on “the shelf,” not on the air.
A 1988 concert to free Mandela was shown by the Fox Network as a
“freedom fest” with artists told not to mention Mandela’s name less they
“politicize” all the fun. When he was released in 2000, a jammed
all-star celebration at London’s Wembley Stadium was shown everywhere in
the world, except by the American networks.
Once Mandela adopted reconciliation as his principal political tenet
and dropped demands for nationalization anchored in the ANC’s “Freedom
Charter,” his image in the U.S. was quickly rehabilitated. He was
elevated into a symbolic hero for all praised by the people and the
global elite alike. Little mention was made of his role as the creator
of an Armed Struggle, and its Commander in Chief,
U.S. networks also did not cover the role played by the
U.S.-dominated IMF and World Bank in steering the economy in a
market-oriented neo-liberal direction, assuring the new government could
not erase deep inequality and massive poverty and that the whites would
retain privileges.
The American press shaped how Mandela was portrayed in the U.S. The
lawyer and anti-nuclear campaigner, Alice Slater, tells a story of her
efforts to win Mandela’s support for nuclear disarmament.
When “Nelson Mandela announced that he would be retiring from the
presidency of South Africa, we organized a world-wide letter writing
campaign, urging him to call for the abolition of nuclear weapons at his
farewell address to the United Nations. The gambit worked.
“At the UN, Nelson Mandela called for the elimination of nuclear
weapons, saying, ‘these terrible and terrifying weapons of mass
destruction — why do they need them anyway?’ The London Guardian had a
picture of Mandela on its front page, with the headline, ‘Nelson Mandela
Calls for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.’
“The New York Times had a story buried on page 46, announcing
Mandela’s retirement from the Presidency of South Africa and speculating
on who might succeed him, reporting that he gave his last speech as
President to the UN, while omitting to mention the content of his
speech.”
And so it goes, with his death seeming to be imminent, he has been
reduced to a symbolic mythic figure, a moral voice, not the politician
he always was. He became an adorable grandfather praised for his
charities with his political ideas and values often lost in the ether of
his celebrity. He has insisted that he not be treated as a saint or a
savior. Tell that to the media.
As ANC veteran Pallo Jordan told me, “To call him a celebrity is to
treat him like Madonna. And that’s not what he is. At the same time, he
deserves to be celebrated as the freedom fighter he was.”
Watch the coverage and see if that message is coming through, with
all of its implications for the struggle in South Africa that still lies
ahead.
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