Galileo Galilei should have been called a coward. Unlike all those other heretics who got bravely burned at the stake, he recanted when the Catholic Church took issue with his celestial sightings and confirmation that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.

But he is a hero, and has always been. Bertolt Brecht wrote a play about young firebrands taking him to task for his lack of enthusiasm for martyrdom, and made Galileo come off best. This reading of his life had always puzzled me, until I discovered the other day that his writings had been reproduced all over Europe by the time he fell out with the Church. A recantation was safely meaningless, since few of the thousands of his books in circulation could be recalled.

A somewhat similar situation has me scratching my head these days, when it comes to the ANC’s media appeals tribunal. What exactly is the party trying to achieve? I agree with City Press editor Ferial Haffajee that it really is an attempt to gain control over the media. But how does it propose to do that with a tribunal?

It’s common cause that the internet has changed the world. Even when you suffer from senile dementia you can see that. News is now constantly available, and instantly reproducible. And it has no centre any more; once on the web, it whizzes everywhere immediately and takes on a life of its own.

Even before the internet, trying to control information did not work. The fall of the Berlin Wall was due in large part to intercontinental radio and TV. Communist countries watched and listened and knew life was better on the other side. LM Radio did its bit to keep the spirit of pop resistance against calvinistic authority in South Africa going. Radio stations outside Zimbabwe kept the opposition going. Cellphones exposed the election robbery of Robert Mugabe in 2008.

As we all know, the internet has one weakness – it is unreliable as a source of truth. It is suffused with rumour, virtuality, disinformation, noninformation, PR and pop psychology. All these act like a veil over the truthfulness that is out there somewhere.

Smart governments have long developed ways to exploit such veils, producing their own fog of noninformation and cluttering the system with inconsequentialities. Officials are trained in producing sound bites that by unceasing repetition become the catchword for the issue at stake. Whole TV series have been written about such shenanigans.

One thing to avoid nowadays is for something to go viral. Then you’ve had it. The only way out for a government would be to sack some people. This where the puzzle about the ANC tribunal is deepest (not that the ANC is a great sacker of people).

Isn’t bringing a matter before a tribunal, upon which surely more media than before will be trained, a failproof recipe for making something go viral? Won’t a poor journalist being grilled Buta Komphela-style by some ANC apparatchik hoping to rise in the ranks make for excellent YouTube theatre?

Or will it be all in camera? That would surely be a contradiction of the transparency that is ostensibly being sought. And it will only enhance the YouTube-ality – imagine our haggard-faced, tousled-haired, tearful journo standing outside a massive wooden door bolted fast, having free rein to give his or her account of what happened.

If I am right about this, the next question is whether no one in the ANC has thought this through – as with so many other half-baked measures, such as the secrecy clauses in the Protection of State Information Bill. Are we having yet another demonstration of capacity constraints? ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu’s ramblings at the Press Freedom Commission hearings would suggest that.

Journalism schools all over the world still teach Noam Chomsky’s ideas on the mainstream media, that it is a tool for ruling elites to manufacture consent through various filters to distort the news. Some of this comes through in the ANC’s digs at the purported white ownership of the media.

But perhaps what is happening is not the ANC’s rejection of the manufacture of consent, but its deep resentment that it is unable to do something similar. Here the synergy between media moguls, politicians, experts and officials that is so rightly criticised in America – and was so devastatingly demonstrated in George Bush’s ability to sell WMDs in Iraq to the public – does not really exist. The mighty SABC should be winning the propaganda war for the ANC hands down, but it is just too inefficient.

One can agonise about a certain measure of liberalistic conformity in the Anglocentric media complex of which we are part, but by far the biggest stick in South Africa’s wheel is the conformity reigning in the townships. The fact that the print media generally have little penetration there is a key factor in the malfunctioning  of democracy under the ANC.

We can write till we are black and blue about rampant misgovernance and maladministration, but as long as the masses conform to the ANC’s liberation-movement ideology, it will have no lasting effect.

As for Galileo, I would be happy to take him as my example. I am not the martyring type; I will be quite ready to recant if the tribunal is set up one day (if my editor will allow me). If there is any truth in what I write in the future, a recantation will not destroy it.

Tags: #ANC, #media tribunal