By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

TO begin with, there are many activists who believe that society no longer needs media policies in the age of digitisation, if it ever did.

But reviewing the world’s recent experience of media   during the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic and listening to social workers, parents and guardians confronted with a drug abuse crisis among youths in Zimbabwe today, a new national media policy framework seems imperative. 

I won’t even go into politicians’ demands for fair media coverage before, during and after elections. 

How are these challenges to be tackled without a robust media and information framework based on a clear understanding of that ever-evolving interface between society and media?

Lingering cold war media and information beliefs and practices

Cold War beliefs and practices were driven by the fight against alleged scarcity or suppression of information and the sluggishness of the little information that was made available. 

So producing as many newsflashes on as many breaking stories as possible was a real heroic act for classical  journalists and media outlets. 

Advertisers of course have always profited from media hype claiming a continuously moving novelty and quick obsolescence of the news product. 

Lately marketers and advertisers have been capitalising on what scholars call ‘upgrade anxiety’ among users of digital communications gadgets and software. 

Ever faster and more efficient machines and software are always peddled by exploiting users’ fears of being left behind or failing to reach the latest sites and outlets or failing to benefit from ever increasing volumes of information.

But in the age of digitisation and the internet, almost everyone can break a story, produce a newsflash. 

In fact, there are so many so-called breaking stories that people no longer pay attention. 

Quality attention is now the most rare and precious item, not information.  

And the brave ones who try to follow as many breaking stories as they can have a hard time making sense of their real day-to-day existence after going through hundreds of thousands of feeds. 

Hence the concept of ‘Data Smog’.

In a book of the same title, journalist David Shenk cited a friend who complained of too much information polluting the media environment and making people fall sick the same way they fell sick from environmental  smog. 

Hence the concept and title of Shenk’s 1997 book Data Smog. 

This word ‘smog’ was coined to describe the sort of hazy atmosphere which was half fog and half smoke and quite toxic. 

When transferred to media and information, smog meant not only excess but also confusion, failure to make sense of the world because of the over-abundance of reported and yet disjointed incidents with many lies claiming to be facts or even truths.

New struggle to return to meaning, a return to making sense

It so happens that the information needed by ordinary citizens in order to come to grips with COVID-19 world-wide and the drug scourge among youths in Zimbabwe cannot come from the latest sensational newsflash. 

In the former case, to make sense of what was happening, the world relied on research already processed and approved by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and competent Government agencies.  

We had to rely on what journalists had dismissed as ‘olds’. 

Universities around the world took the lead in developing vaccines based on past knowledge of SARS  while many African communities revisited well-tried home remedies once used by their ancestors to fight flu and the common cold.

In the fight against drug addiction, Zimbabwe needs to study the history of drug-trafficking and drug inducement and entrapment going back almost 50 years and to understand, especially the use of drugs as weapons of destabilisation.  

For instance, during the Reagan administration in the US, drug-peddling became part of imperial policy whereby in order to fund clandestine terror groups around the world, Western governments sold drugs and sponsored drug cartels.  

The history of imperialist destabilisation becomes the real necessary news required by our people to understand the link between the recent destabilisation of the African community-based ‘family’ and the abandonment of our youths to hostile media and drugs. Much really helpful ‘news’ can be obtained by seeking access to ‘old’ Cuban and other Latin-American  research on the destabilisation of Latin America. 

Here at home, it is about 35 years now since the advent of neoliberal Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and HIV and AIDS resulted in a new social phenomenon called ‘street kids’. 

The media found ways of getting us used to this bizarre terminology as a sort of ‘new normal’. 

To understand this new development we did not need newsflashes. 

We needed to study the history of countries subjected to SAPs long before Zimbabwe. 

SAPs, like current economic propaganda focused on  ‘economic growth’ while downplaying the fact that it was our society and culture which were being restructured, ‘adjusted’ beyond our recognition. 

Now we will be adding ‘drug kids’ to the bizarre term ‘street kids’.

Neoliberal focus on growth and marketing

In the face of Data Smog and Infoglut, the neoliberal push for ‘More Means Better’, the push for mere growth measured in gross aggregates, has become dangerous because in the case of media it celebrates more confusion. 

What is missing is the historical thread that ties the alleged abundance together. 

In the middle of overwhelming volumes of information on COVID-19, WHO and public health departments and agencies provided the glue and thread. 

Those societies who have over-privatised their health systems according to the neoliberal doctrine are still in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic even now.

According to Shenk: “Journalists can provide the vital social glue that makes us a common unit,  and also help us analyse competing statistical claims. Unfortunately, many  journalists reflexively balk at the of stories that smell  like  ‘old news,’ reporting instead the latest opinion poll, the shocking personal indiscretion, this morning’s testimony.”  

That is typical of the ‘newsflash’ mindset.

Neoliberalism and marketing

The SAP in Zimbabwe was translated by the ZBC at the time as ‘Chirongwa chokuwandudza upfumi’. 

And I remember asking many times: “Upfumi hwaani huri kuwandudzwa?” 

When it comes to the expansion of media outlets there are many views and  interests the policy analyst should critique:

• There are those who live on getting their ‘cut’ from mark-ups for approving media project contracts. 

• There are those who represent manufacturers of hardware. 

• There are those who make, upgrade  and sell the software. 

• There are those who produce and copyright ready content. 

• There are those who will buy the availed media space for commercial advertising, and, 

• There are those who hope to develop and exhibit their original creative content in the expanded media space.

But since there are costs involved in all the various activities, money and power will be at play; so that even the most obvious and optimal choices from the point of view and long term interests of the people might not prevail. 

Sustainability might be overlooked in preference for profitable obsolescence. 

To use a non-media example; Zimbabweans learned in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic that it was a big blunder during ESAP to privatise the public transport function and dismantle Zimbabwe United Passenger Company (ZUPCO). 

But sellers and owners of commuter omnibuses (kombis) and make-shift mishika-shika continue to compromise and undermine ZUPCO to this day just as owners and promoters of haulage trucks compromise the National Railways of Zimbabwe despite its obvious long-term benefits.