Hyperbole harms media's cause

Greener's Law, which says one should never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, was never so apposite as last week, when parliament voted to adopt the Protection of State Information Bill.

The South African media pulled out every stop to produce a crescendo of criticism and opposition the likes of which I cannot remember in our post-apartheid history.

I did my bit to protest against the adoption of the bill because I share the belief of my media colleagues that its passage may mark a turning point in our history, but the cumulative effect of the week left me with the uneasy feeling that we are missing the bigger picture.

It is not the way of what South African National Editors' Forum chairman Mondli Makhanya calls "our tribe" to criticise each other in public, so I shan't name names.

But some of the analysis and criticism served not to inform nor persuade, but only to polarise an already dangerous debate.

A lot of it was based on early drafts of the much-improved bill. Much of it relied on repeated inaccuracies and misinterpretations of the final text, much like the regurgitated summary of Judge Hilary Squires' judgment in the Schabir Shaik case.

If we define the threat wrongly and replace reason with noise, we undermine our own credibility in this life-and-death debate.

It was hyperbole to report, as some of us did, on the day after the vote that South Africa mourned the death of democracy - or that it took us "beyond apartheid".

Many South Africans have no problem with the bill. I would argue that they are misinformed, but they certainly were not in mourning.

On the second point, apartheid comprised a host of horrors more awful than this, from the Land Act and pass laws to detention without trial and capital punishment.

But it is no over-statement to say that the vote was an omen of devastating political climate change that will drown our democracy if it is not quickly reversed.

President Jacob Zuma's gerrymandering of the state and its controls - what some are calling the Zanufication of South Africa - is the real threat.

If we are pushed to the brink, we will survive a muzzled press better than a defanged judiciary. Courts with teeth can always unleash a media watchdog.

William Greener, an adviser to US president Gerald Ford, pinned the Mark Twain quote "Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel" to a White House wall, where it became known as Greener's Law and guided spokesmen to spin the news rather than confront the combined might of the press.

But if the media is going to use the combined might of its many presses and broadcast frequencies to fight the government, it should do so on the basis of considered analysis and in balance against other causes that may be as important to other sectors of the society we pledge in our Press Code to serve. Imagine a similarly loud and sustained campaign on healthcare, education or child abuse.

It is a tribute to the tireless work of civil society lobbies such as Right2Know and the political opposition that the final bill was quite good - but for one fatal omission and one dangerous provision.

The bill reins in the existing powers of the state to create secrets and includes a laborious review of all currently classified information against a much more limited justification for secrecy. It also gives the automatic right to classify only to security agencies, mainly the police and intelligence services.

It includes a cast-iron prohibition on the use of secrecy to conceal crime, corruption or incompetence or to avoid embarrassment as well as intricate provisions to challenge the classification of information and to apply for its release.

In truth, the lawful application of the provisions in this bill would have absolutely no direct effect on the life's work of most South African journalists.

But lost in the detail is the dangerous provision that would allow the minister of state security, on application, to extend the right to classify to any organ of state.

And without the public interest defence, the absence of which is the fatal flaw, all the protections in the bill could be disabled by its own misapplication. No one would dare to report its unlawful application to conceal crimes or avoid the embarrassment of state failure because doing so would be a crime.

We owe it to our society to report the big picture. The threat to our democracy is of death by 1000 cuts, not decapitation.

The media's role must be to identify, fearlessly report and accurately analyse every nick and scratch so no one will be able to say at the funeral for the rule of law: I'm sorry, I did not know.