Let me be honest with you on this World Press Freedom Day, because honesty is the only thing worth offering on a day like this.
I lead a party that is often given short shrift by the South African media, and I have long since stopped expecting fair treatment. I do not say that bitterly. I say it as a man who has learned to plan around the weather rather than complain about it. I am a former prisoner who decided not only to live a normal life but to live one well above the ordinary. That is, for some commentators, an unforgivable act.
I accept that I will always be interesting to people. I accept that I will be a target. If you have a story like mine, and you walk into a cabinet, you do not get to ask the cameras to look the other way. So, I do not write this column to plead for kinder coverage. I write it because, even after everything, I still believe a free press is one of the most important things this country has, and I do not want any minister – including me – to be the one who forgets that.
I do think our press is uniquely cynical, and I think I understand why. South Africans were promised a kind of utopia in 1994, and what we got instead was a country run by human beings, with all the greed, vanity and self-interest that human beings reliably bring to power.
The disappointment is real, and the press has metabolised it. We are learning the lessons of democracy the hard way, in real time, and journalists are watching us do it. They have every right to be sceptical. The job of public office is to earn back trust we have not yet earned.
A free and accountable media is part of how a country grows up. It is one of the ways we shape the society we say we want, rather than the one we keep settling for. But I would be dishonest if I did not also say that a great deal gets lost in how the South African story is told.
Take SARS. The turnaround at the Revenue Service is one of the most consequential pieces of state repair in our recent history, and most South Africans could not tell you the half of it. The systemic work being done at Eskom, the gradual rebuilding of Transnet and our rail network, tourism numbers climbing again, inflation being brought under control, the structural reforms Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs is preparing for local government – these are not small things. They are the unglamorous machinery of a country pulling itself back into shape. You will struggle to find them on the front page, because they do not lend themselves to a headline. Recovery is slow, and slow is boring.
Headline-chasing is a feature of the trade everywhere in the world. The press is built to notice the bumps and the dips, not the long upward arc. A free press will get it wrong. It will sometimes drown us in sensationalist dreck. It will chase the loud thing past the important one. And it is still, by some distance, better than every alternative ever attempted.
That is why I am also, frankly, grateful for social media. I rely on platforms like X and Facebook to speak directly to South Africans, and I do not apologise for that. For most of our history, leaders who looked and sounded like me had no way of being heard except through gatekeepers who often did not want to hear us. That has changed, and it is a good change. But social media cannot do the work of journalism. It cannot investigate. It cannot sit through a parliamentary committee for six hours. It cannot read a tender document. It is a megaphone, not a profession.
The profession is what we still need. And so my hope on this World Press Freedom Day is that the people who take up journalism in this country take it up seriously. That they do the hard work, get it right more often than they get it wrong, and earn the trust they are sometimes too quick to assume they already have.
A free press is a pain; it is also a public good. South Africa needs both halves of that sentence to be true. Happy World Press Freedom Day.
- McKenzie is the Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture
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- Let me be honest with you on this World Press Freedom Day, because honesty is the only thing worth offering on a day like this.
- I lead a party that is often given short shrift by the South African media, and I have long since stopped expecting fair treatment.
- I do not say that bitterly.
- I say it as a man who has learned to plan around the weather rather than complain about it.
- I am a former prisoner who decided not only to live a normal life but to live one well above the ordinary.
