Oh what a pity Jeremy Cronin is not a poet anymore, not a public one anyway. I have a suspicion if he had stayed a poet like he was in the 1980s when he first burst on to the struggle scene, our poetry would have been much better off – as would have been our politics.

I still remember his performances on stage in places like Yeoville, where the halls were packed when the United Democratic Front held its concerts.

His peculiarly engaging “amateur” gestures and rolling rhythms helped to made many of us realise it was not enough to sleep with black women and smoke dope to beat apartheid.

Today, English poetry in SA, especially written by whites, is a little meek and mild, often expressions of cultural cringe by the marginalised caught between a guilt-ridden past and a dead-end future. It pales in comparison with the vibrant Afrikaans scene, where thousands of visits are registered on two well-sponsored websites devoted exclusively to creative writing. Jeremy Cronin might have changed all that.

Instead he has turned into an ideologue, one of the worst types, who presents his dogmatic knee-jerk reactions with a veneer of pragmatic adaptability to the times, or an acknowledgement of the need for marketing in a post-post-post-capitalist world.

Last week the Projourn media association disseminated on its Facebook lists an “analysis” by Cronin of the National Press Club’s survey of attitudes among journalists to control from the top.

Now the difference between poetry and communism is encapsulated in a phrase doing the current rounds in one of those serendipitous ecologies of ideas: “epistemological modesty”. Poets don’t always know what’s going on. Every poem is a venture into fields of as-yet-unknown possible meanings. As Ruth Padel puts it: “The story is in the dark.”

Communists, on the other hand, know everything. After every capitalist crisis they say, I told you so. Even global warming – it’s pure class struggle, isn’t it, so Marx must have predicted it.

In his analysis, Cronin suggests that the dastardly profit motive is compelling media gatekeepers to change the copy of reporters to suit their nefarious ends. He makes much of responses in the survey  such as only 29% agreeing, “If changes are made to my story, I am usually informed about these changes before publication/broadcast”. And only 21% agreeing, “I have control over the use of my copy on all platforms where my company chooses to publish it.”

The beauty of analyses by communists is that they always reveal the same sort of contradictions of which they accuse capitalism. Cronin also complains about the juniorisation of newsrooms, because of cost-cutting driven by the profit motive. Such juniorisation is all too true, but do you see the clash here?

On the one hand he wants the work of reporters, of whom the majority are juniors, to go into the media unchanged. On the other he deems the curtailment of such control through juniorisation as part of a deliberate strategy to demean the quality of media.

That may even be true, but Cronin should know, but obviously does not anymore, that reporters are more like poets than communists – they also work in the dark. News is typically based on rumour or leakage of some sort. Reporters are briefed to check these out, and taught from the start that the best way is to go and see for themselves. At the scene of the crime the first obstacle one encounters is that there is always more than one version of what happened.

Which is the right one? That is the nub of the matter. The communists say whatever illustrates the class struggle. Students say it’s the struggle to get to class. Teachers say it’s the struggle to get the class to pay attention.

The media have developed layers of monitoring to try to answer such questions. A lot of rewriting and recasting is involved in what is a truly collective effort. These try to get as many of the objective facts as time and deadlines allow, but there is always a residue of subjectivity, hence the use of bylines.

Bylines are also a motivational tool, but since one has to have a strong ego to work in the dark, reporters often make the mistake of thinking their name on the front page  is the first step towards the Booker Prize. So such responses are not entirely to be trusted out of context.

All the residual subjectivity accumulates into a grand narrative behind every story, as expressed in the medium’s slant. Slant is prescribed by the readership. The conservatives want the status quo to be validated, so they read The Star. Communists see everything through economic goggles, so they read Business Day. (They can’t impose any other slant, because they have too few followers.)

Cronin quotes the survey to say “only 55%” said there is not undue pressure to get a story published when it is not ready. But when is a story ever ready? Courts sometimes take months to pin down what exactly happened during a crime, truth commissions take years and then have to disband and bury their half-findings on the internet.

I challenge Cronin to produce a newspaper article that ever comes to a final conclusion. The principle behind it is one of the foundations of modernity, what one might call “epistemological courage”. In science you have hypotheses that get tested; in courts you have charge sheets; in the media you have the day’s breaking news.

This provisionality of all media items is what makes the media system work despite its many flaws and failings. Plus the nature of one of our human faculties: memory. Communist types like to quote Milan Kundera – never mind that he is an anticommunist Czech writer – on the war of memory against forgetting, and that the media is on the side of forgetting.

I cannot disagree less. But how fortunate it is that we have such a frail capacity to remember. Stories that turn out to be wrong, “don’t get legs”, as we journalists  say – they don’t get picked up by other media. They are soon overrun by an avalanche of new, provisional statements.

This dynamic has produced a foundational cliche of our contemporary culture -  that you can’t believe what you read in the newspapers.What proponents of a media tribunal do not realise, is that their investigations would actually give stories that turn out to be erroneous the legs they lost in the first place.

Cronin should not bluff himself that a media tribunal is not meant as a censoring body, and that it won’t degenerate into bullying by hysterical, dogmatic types like Butana Komphela. Communists should always factor in the dreadful history of Soviet show trials when they talk about media control mechanisms, otherwise they already recuse themselves from the debate through cynical self-censorship.

Here’s another little challenge: Say something about the Chinese government’s detention of Ai Weiwei, the latest artist to fall victim of the crackdown on freedom of speech proponents. Better now than after a second Tiananmen Square, inspired by the Jasmine Revolution in North Africa.

Tags: #Ai Weiwei, #Chinese government, #communists, #Jeremy Cronin, #Ruth Padel