Blacks, women must be aggressive in tackling this injustice in media Mpofu-Walsh – SowetanLIVE

Black people and women who continue to be underrepresented in the South African media must be aggressive in tackling this injustice.

This is according to activist and author Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, who delivered a keynote address during the 11th Annual Percy Qoboza Memorial Lecture on Tuesday.

Mpofu-Walsh said the injustice against black people and women in the media landscape is aggressive in its oppression.

The lecture was hosted by the National Press Club in partnership with the University of South Africa and Qobozas family in order to commemorate the events of October 19 1977, the day known as Black Wednesday.

On that day, the apartheid government banned Black Consciousness organisations, publications and people critical of the state at the time, including Qoboza, who was the editor of The World and Weekend World newspapers.

The theme of the lecture on Tuesday was "the role of the media in the digital age. How far will it go in serving as the voice of the dispossessed and as a channel of change and real democracy?

Mpofu-Walsh urged leaders in the media to deliberately and urgently chart a programme to address the shortage of black people and women in the media space.

He noted "notable exceptions which rise to prominence in public debate and we think that things are changing and moving in the right direction".

"We have not been aggressive enough to attack injustice. We need to be aggressive against injustice because injustice is stubborn and aggressive in its oppression, he said.

Mpofu-Walsh recently published a book titled The New Apartheid: Apartheid did not die; it was privatised. According to Mpofu-Walsh, the book explores how there are still remnants of the apartheid state in SA post-1994 and how a mere removal of apartheid legislation has not uprooted the economic, social and political order of the racist system.

I believe firmly that apartheid did not die and that it was privatised. We need to turn our attention to the private realm, to those who wield private power, to understand how apartheid has taken a new life in the current moment," Mpofu-Walsh said.

He said apartheid, which is essentially an ideology of minority control, still prevailed in SA's media space.

"A situation where despite the demographic make-up of SA, and the predominance of black South Africans, in the spaces that matter where real decisions are made and real choices are taken, the demographic majority becomes a minority.

Mpofu-Walsh added the majority is still the minority in the media space "both in terms of race and extremely crucially in our time in terms gender".

"According to the latest published state of the newsroom report from the Wits School of Journalism, 49% of SA's newspapers editors are black African. This is no reason for celebration. In fact, it is a shocking indictment on how little has changed in the South African mediascape in three decades. While 28% are white.

How in our so-called miracle [at dawn of democracy] have we allowed a situation in which three decades later, we have a vast and disproportionate overrepresentation of white voices in our editorial spaces and a chronic underrepresentation of black voices. And I am afraid the situation gets deeper when we look at the question of gender. 67% of newspaper editors in SA are gendered as men and a meagre 33% as women.

He said statistics have shown that black representation "is at a staggering and shocking 39%... white representation is at 30%, still nearly rivalling black representation."

"In terms of gender we have 72% of men represented at the boardroom table and 28% of women. If we look at black women, we can half that figure."

He said when the country celebrated the victory over apartheid it did so while the patterns of apartheid still existed and were a reality three decades later into democracy.

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Blacks, women must be aggressive in tackling this injustice in media Mpofu-Walsh - SowetanLIVE