Zuma slams press in letter

President Jacob Zuma has set the tone for a "summit" with newspaper editors and owners, and it looks poised to be a hostile encounter.

Writing on his party's website, Zuma challenged the bona fides of the country's journalists and defended plans for a statutory media appeals tribunal.

Mondli Makhanya, chairman of the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef) and Avusa editor-in-chief, said yesterday that Zuma's letter was a serious setback in the search for a common understanding between government and media.

Makhanya said arrangements were being finalised for the summit around the end of the month.

Anton Harber, professor of journalism at Wits University, questioned the timing of Zuma's call for a debate on the media.

"The ANC is coming up to a very difficult policy conference with complex issues like the nationalisation of mines on the table. Bashing the media is an easy distraction from the real issues," he said.

Guy Berger, head of the Rhodes University journalism school, criticised Zuma's decision to make freedom of expression the dominant debate of the moment, rather than xenophobia, health or education.

Zuma insisted in his online letter that the debate was urgent.

"We have a responsibility to democratise every aspect of South African society, including the media. It is our historical duty," he said.

In a series of apparently rhetorical questions, he suggested that the media:

• Does not mirror South African society;
• Is not in touch with what the majority of South Africans think and feel;
• Does not "actually know and understand South Africans";
• Is alienated from the post-apartheid democratic order;
• Is not on "the same wavelength regarding where South Africa should go politically, socially and economically";
• Does not understand this wavelength "well enough to articulate it to South Africans and to enable it to accurately judge government action and performance".

Makhanya said Zuma's letter demonstrated a series of false assumptions about how news media operated.

"The government-media summit will give us an opportunity to answer all these rhetorical questions and to debunk the myths in his letter," he said.

Berger said Zuma's intervention would bolster the lobby pushing for media regulation.

Zuma charged in his message that the media had been negative about the 2010 World Cup and that readers had "decided to defy the chorus of division and negativity".

But William Bird, head of Media Monitoring Africa, said: "If anything, the South African media erred on the side of fawning."