Excerpt from Fight for Democracy by Glenda Daniels

The Mail & Guardian has shared an excerpt from Fight for Democracy: The African National Congress and the Media in South Africa by Glenda Daniels.

In this extract Glenda discusses the notions of fantasy in the ANC’s perception of the media and argues that the issues that they have with the media are a projection of their own failures:

“We are aware that every Thursday night a group of journalists … decide what stories they will go into. This is very clear when we do our analysis. What we see is a pack approach with a story that breaks in the Saturday Star, then is repeated in Business Day with a slightly different angle and then in the Citizen with a … slightly new perspective.”

So said Jesse Duarte, one of the people in the ANC most hostile to the media, in 2008. These words highlight her “gaze” – inaccurate and fantasmic – on journalists and how she perceived the profession to operate.

As Slavoj Zizek writes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, the “gaze” is part of the “social fantasy”, “a point at which the very frame [of my view] is already inscribed in the ‘content’ of the picture viewed”.

• Keep reading: Mail & Guardian

Book details

• Fight for Democracy: The African National Congress and the Media in South Africa by Glenda Daniels
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  EAN: 9781868145683
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