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Ranga Mataire, Group Political Editor
How we respond to a media product, particularly one packaged in a video format fundamentally depends on rational thinking.
Rational thinking refers to the ability to think with reason. It encompasses the ability to draw sensible conclusions from facts, logic and data.
What has become clear in light of the Al Jazeera documentary infamously and erroneously headlined “The Gold Mafia” is that a lot of compatriots lack rational thinking. The absence of rational thinking makes one susceptible to other people’s gory perceptions about a thing, an event or a media product.
One could tell the susceptibility by the sheer herd mentality at play of individuals, some of whom never watched the two episodes. When one is empty and lacks the basic tools of critical thinking, there is a huge chance of the individual being swayed by whatever overriding interpretations pushed by other individuals, most of whom have ulterior motives.
This is what has so far happened to many individuals after watching the documentary. Before we delve into the merits or demerits of the documentary as a media product, let’s look at basic questions that will help evaluate its ultimate agenda.
The documentary makes direct and indirect claims or insinuations. It claims Zimbabwe is a haven of money laundering and that criminal elements working with Government officials are at the centre of gold smuggling and looting. The documentary also insinuates that revenue from sales of gold is externalised.
We all know from simple research of the existence of countries notoriously known as havens of money laundering, drug peddling and all manner of organised crime and Zimbabwe is not one of them by any stretch of imagination.
So why did Al Jazeera target lowly Zimbabwe? The immediate answer is that the producers knew that the country was heading for a harmonised elections, which stakes are very high. They also knew that Zimbabwe is using its gold to stabilise its currency and in general its economy. Some local opposition activists who thought the documentary could boost their fortunes also played a key role in timing the productions with impending elections.
But to psychologically sway the audience, Al Jazeera makes this balderdash claim of Zimbabwe being at the mercy of “gold mafia” who are looting the country’s gold for their own selfish personal enrichment.
The way the interviews were conducted was ridiculous in that there is a clear element of coercion that forces an individual to respond in a certain predictable way. This is achieved by asking leading questions that make it inevitable for the interviewee not to agree with the interviewer. In other words, the interviewer asks what he/she wants to hear and the interviewee answers exactly in the manner that the interviewer wants.
In other words, the manner in which the interviews were conducted were so contrived as to achieve nothing but the intended outcome.
There is so far no single Government official who has so far been recorded on camera confirming the shenanigans that the documentary claims are rampant in the country.
Government officials are simply name-dropped but never directly contacted. It is thus shocking for anyone to conclude that the Government is aiding or is part of the criminal activities of some individuals in the gold trade. Such irrefutable evidence is glaringly absent.
While some individuals interviewed expressed their intention to “assist” in laundering money, none actually proffered evidence of what they had done except for third parties showing what they said were proof of fraudulent papers created in South Africa and not Zimbabwe.
The insinuation that Zimbabwe’s gold was being looted is simply bar talk. Just like any commodity, gold needs to be mined. When it is mined, it is first traded locally, processed and sold to foreign markets. How then does gold mined by small artisanal miners or mining companies and sold outside become “our gold” is really shocking? This is a clear lack of national thought. As long as something confirms one’s bias he/she just goes with it without interrogating it deeper.
As a nation, we seem to lack what one columnist, Jamwanda2 on Saturday, called a Zimbabwean Geist, a typical national thought uniquely Zimbabwean that empowers and shields us from nefarious intrusion from characters or nations that have zero interest in our survival as a nation.
In Jamwanda2 on Saturday’s words: “It did not matter which side one took: the issue is Al Jazeera told us what to think about, even then before it had exhausted its four-part effort.”
A society is told what to think, focus and debate. Without an intellectual base or a National Thought, we become unconscious pawns to a bigger scheme by the same forces seeking to degrade us as unfit to govern ourselves.
An outsider telling a whole Nation what its great National Question is or should be, at some given moment?
I was hesitant to comment on the whole documentary because doing so would mean legitimising its concocted contents. However, seeing my fellow scribes falling upon each other in creating stories out of the documentary made me question the whole essence of the Fourth Estate, as an institution that not only educates, informs and entertains but is also the conveyor belt of ideas that are supposed to shape National Thought.
Our attitude as journalists towards a media product is fundamentally shaped by our own ability to understand the pervading effects of cultural hegemony. It also depended on our attitude towards the media organisation that produces or packages the media product. If you see people falling over each other to tap from the Al Jazeera documentary without formulating a counter hegemony to critically evaluate the product, it shows levels of superiority and inferiority at play. Al Jazeera is deemed a superior institution, which is beyond reproach or questioning.
This is exactly what Antonio Gramsci alludes to when he says that all men are intellectuals, in that all have intellectual and rational faculties but not all men have the social function of intellectuals. Gramsci saw modern intellectuals (journalists included) as not just talkers but practical minded directors and organisers who produced hegemony through ideological apparatuses such as education and the media.
I am most disappointed by my fellow journalists’ inability to respond objectively to a media product that has a clear agenda. We appear so bamboozled by anything that has Westerners (read as whites) with it and they set the tenor, tone, slant of what we consume as news. Where are our critical thinking skills when a media product is foisted upon us? Do we sheepishly accept it as gospel truth or evaluate its whole essence and its ultimate goals?
We are doing a disservice to our audiences if all we do is to regurgitate what some foreign media house foists upon us as the National Question of the day. We have allowed the Western media to set the agenda & tenor of what makes news & how it is reported across the world (the slant & the pitch). The local media is sadly caught up in the web and having been so bamboozled, it’s reduced to only mimicking what Western media puts out about us.
We gullibly follow the lead set by others and this is partly due to poor training. We are at the end of the day what we know. What do we know about Al Jazeera? What do we know about gold trading in Zimbabwe and beyond? Why should we think that any Western media organisation is a standard bearer of journalism?
Our local audiences or publics deserve better from the local media. We cannot simply be pushed by herd mentality. We must be able to interrogate anything that threatens our existence as a nation.
Above everything else, we should never let ourselves as a people and as journalists be pushed down by pessimism. Martin Luther says “No greater tragedy can befall a people than to be circumscribed to the dark chambers of pessimism.”
Online Reporter