"If shown to the wrong audience, [Indaba Ye Grievance] could put a weapon into the hands of the ill-informed"

(Manager's comment, 1985).

Information, persuasion, propaganda, misinformation and indoctrination are recurring terms in studies of advertising, public relations and social control. Muddled and overlapping applications of these concepts have, in the age of mass media, confused rather than clarified our understanding of communication. In orthodox discussions of these terms, contexts and histories are ignored or suppressed and the relationships between texts (messages) and historical material processes glossed over. Neither context (the background conditions), communication (transmission), message (content), interpretation (reception) nor behaviour (effects), can be fully understood in a media-centric analysis.

Few studies of communication admit that lies and lying, double-talk, deception, psychological warfare and the struggle for signs and meaning is part of communication (see Media Development, 1986). The concept all too often assumes a benevolent aspect, as if all communication has an equal and positive value for all interacting parties. This is rarely the case, however, as inter-personal, inter-class and inter-cultural power relations always circumscribe the nature of the interaction.

The responses of managers and supervisors to Indaba Ye Grievance (1984) is a case in point. Made to popularise grievance procedures amongst migrant, illiterate construction workers, the film alienated managers/supervisors and the sponsors, the Building Industries Federation of South Africa and Federated Insurance. They claimed that it "was unrealistic". The "thought of workers seeing the film generated a great deal of unease". "This contrasts strongly with the emphatic worker endorsement of the film" (Godsell 1985:19-20). Workers accepted it as a genuine attempt at communication.

Before pursuing an explanation of the differing responses to Indaba Ye Grievance, let me briefly excavate the original meaning of the concept of `communication'.

`Communication' comes from the Latin, communis (to make common to many) and communicare (to establish a community, to share). Theologically, `communication' begins and ends with that dimension of dialogue. The idea of `communism' (derived from common/communion) emerges from this same root.

Communication fails when there is a refusal to communicate and be in communion (Traber 1989:61) -- the preferred response of white managers and supervisors to Indaba Ye Grievance. It is in terms of this sense of communication that most employers operate. To communicate and be in communion with them means to lose direct authoritarian control over subordinates -- to see them "as human", as one manager responded after seeing Grievance. The fear of loss of employee control relates to the fear of having to cede the competitive edge, to be out-maneuvered in the market, and to lose profits.

Communication, therefore, in the marketplace at least, has little to do with dialogue except of a very specific, pre-categorised, market research, stimulus-response, kind. At the politico-economic level, then, `communication' is the articulation of power and therefore of social relations between people (Siegelaub 1979:11). Styles of communication are an indication of the kinds of relationships, or bondage, exploitation and resistance, that mark out unequal terrains of interaction and struggle within societies and on the factory floor.

The way communication flow is institutionalised in a society reveals its assumptions of democracy and conceptions of humanity. Though capitalist and communist economies were locked into the Cold War for much of this century, at the end of the day, their institutional understandings of communication were not really that different, though the Western media did permit a much greater degree of dissent, as long as it served the specific interests they represented. We thus need to question the contemptuous stereotypical view of the `masses' -- whether in the communist or capitalist senses: "There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses" (Williams 1977). This condescending image of readers held by mass media producers is indicated in the cliché of the likely reader as the woman with a Standard Six education who rides the Turfontein Bus. Each city newsroom has its imaginary destination of this imaginary woman consumer who reads the local papers.

Seeing people as `mass markets' (`lumps' or `amorphous aggregates') is a perception which similarly undermines the original concept of communication. Significant is how the different `markets' are assumed to have discrete intelligences related to spending power. The complex reporting in the financial and computer pages of newspapers are aimed at educated, already knowledgeable, readers. Think of SABC-TV News reporting on the financial markets: what `bus passenger' can possibly make sense of jargon like `politics depressed market sentiment', or `gold rested easier', let alone understand the intricacies of the BA rate or market indexes? While sophisticated codes are required to interpret these quaint metaphors, the remainder of the newswhole is written for your average uneducated bus commuter.

`Mass' media is the preferred system of communication of multinational capitalism, authoritarian and Leninist-vanguardist states. In these economic systems, citizens are spoken `down to' by the media. As one anthropologist engaged in a study of US corporate executives concluded:

Corporations tend by their very nature to be structures of oppression and collusion, sinks of secrecy; they are authoritarian, unimaginative, anti-intellectual, obsessed with rationality, and everything from education to research applied immediately toward the turning of a profit (Rose 1991:115).

Excepting for the reference to "profit", this statement could just as easily apply to the socially homogenising consequences of communism. The seemingly wide range of popular magazines available at the CNA, for example, is questioned by their essential sameness in content and limited possibilities for meaningful reader responses or ideological engagement.

Inadequate knowledge of local conditions, or what recipients themselves think, want to do -- i.e. those dimensions which elude the statistical categories of market research -- is a failing of most mass media systems. The problem resides in the functionalist Communicator-Medium-Response (C-M-R) or sender-receiver model. This deterministic equation was inadvisedly adapted by communication scholars from 1940s telecommunications modelling studies conducted by Bell Laboratories (Shannon and Weaver 1949). Although useful in building theories of information transfer and engineering systems, the only human community to which the model is applicable is the military unit in which absolute one-way, top-down tightly code-bound and restricted communication predominates. The equation cannot, for example, describe situations where recipients resist, contest, reject, misunderstand (or even understand) complex information imposed on them.

The C-M-R model, naively replicated in most communication text books with an ever more spidery appearance of feedback channels, return loops and related simplistic attempts to make it work for human communication, has an obvious appeal to soldiers, managers and bureaucrats. This is because these apparchiks tend to seek the `most efficient' way of rationalising civil and business administrations. By this means, elites reserve for themselves the right to speak to whom about what and how. Paradoxically, they mislead themselves into thinking that this constitutes communication. When subordinates have a different interpretation, as with Indaba Ye Grievance, then managers argue that this form of communication, which actually intersects with worker experiences, is dangerous because it "would give the workers ideas" (Godsell 1985:37). What they mean, of course, is that the idea of workers engaging in two-way open communication with their employers, means at best restructuring communication networks which assume that workers/blacks actually have intelligence and ideas useful to the firm. At worst, they might provide channels for political resistance.

The study of propaganda held a privileged place in communications theory and research from the early 1940s to the '60s. It has been negatively distorted from its original Christian use, meaning to propagate the faith. (In contemporary use, however, `propagation' remains distinct from `political propaganda'.) The term can be applied to anything from truth (presented within a particular argument) to outright lies. Ultimately then, any attempt at persuasion is propaganda. Because propaganda has both positive and negative connotations, as used in conventional media studies it is too general for useful application.

The concept of propaganda reflects the deterministic history of the communications discipline as a whole. Propaganda was seen as the archetypal case of the communications process in general, and was based on the mechanistic cause-effect C-M-R model. As this model was discredited, so too, the idea of `propaganda' became increasingly problematic, though some scholars blissfully soldier on irrespective of the term's faults (Jowett and O'Donnell 1986).

Neither is the term persuasion very helpful. Where propaganda is argued to be directed at a "collectivity", persuasion is said to be aimed at individuals (Finn et al 1983:6). Both are deliberate attempts to instill, control and disseminate messages designed to bring about a specific effect planned by the communicator on the recipient -- for example, the purchase of a product or belief. The same could be said for certain kinds of education.

Distinctions between these concepts in the way they are used are almost impossible to determine as most mass media messages result from an interplay of propagandistic, persuasive and indoctrination elements.

Information is similarly a word whose history, military and bureaucratic embeddedness is concealed in state discourse (Peters 1988). Information results from political, social and commercial institutions serving particular constellations of economic interests. Information is neither neutral nor value-free. Such knowledge is facilitated by the growth of bureaucracies and made to seem true through statistical patterning and agglomerative categories: for example, the averaging of per capita income smooths over the extraordinary disparities of income and wealth in South Africa, also concealing the distorted nature of capitalism as it has developed here.

The management of people and property by capital and state bureaucracies at distances through telecommunications and information technology is facilitated by computers and data processing. Previously in the public domain, whole chunks of information and entertainment in advanced capitalist societies are being increasingly regulated through commodification and state licensing controls - that 97% of the South African public had no access to viewing live TV transmissions of the national team participating in the 1992 World Cup Cricket in Australia is an example of how previously public information and a national resource (the team) was hi-jacked by commercial interests and restricted to those who could afford to pay.

The explosion in South Africa of premium rate telephone services in early 1992, is another example. These lines now also commoditise information that was previously free (eg. weather reports, cricket scores etc). These lines are profitable for both Telkom and the entrepreneurs who telephonically package this information. As a commodity, information now fragments experience through restriction to those who can afford to pay and who are located in mainly white areas served by this new form of indirect taxation. This top-down communication entirely excludes the majority of South Africa's population which can neither afford these services nor get access to the phones required to make contact.

Yet only a year ago [1991], the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs was complaining that telephone subscribers were overloading the system, which was the reason he had to place a time-charge on call use. This increase preceded the `privatisation' of Telkom which no longer aims to provide a service, but to make a profit (Telkom Letter, Daily News, December 30, 1991). Making profits, however, is not a guarantee of efficient or cost-effective service. Those marginalised communities which should be incorporated into the national telecommunication grid to facilitate a national development strategy remain excluded, isolated, poverty-stricken, and desperate.

Since the severing of the Post Office from the phone service in 1992, cross subsidisation is prevented. This so-called rationalisation exacerbates the differences between the highly developed urban technological sector and underdeveloped rural regions. While the well heeled urban tele-voyeurs get their vicarious kicks from the new sex, sin, sports and stars-foretell lines, the use of telecommunications for integrating urban and rural development seems not to be on the agenda. Profit imperatives in public service corporations now enforce market censorship and penalises those outside the ambit of these para-statal firms.

`New' information makes previous information imperfect and obsolete; it forces discontinuities and suppresses the historical imagination. For example accountants think it rather quaint that academics keep their old copies of Financial Mail for reference purposes. That's the problem with academics -- their insistence on properly understanding the present in terms of historical trends makes them redundant as far as firms and the state are concerned. This surface slice of understanding, however, results in misinformation and incorrect choices, with sometimes disastrous consequences.

Misinformation refers to "false or misleading information based on error or ignorance" (Webster's New World Dictionary). In Indaba Ye Grievance, the initial script showed the grievance procedure to have originated from the kindness of management, a mis-representation which may possibly have alienated the worker audience. Misinformation typifies political communication. The term is often preferred to disinformation. The latter concept, however, usually additionally involves a malicious intent (Bittmann 1985).

The concept of ideology explains much better than propaganda and persuasion (even communication) how people make sense of their lives by internalising particular, repeated images of the world view held by those in power. Mass media are prime agents in the construction of a reality which seems true and natural. Capitalism, for example, is portrayed by the South African mass media as the only `natural' God-given economic system. This belief is elevated into fact through repetition by the media even though the majority of the black working class in South Africa may see it as the embodiment of imperialism and exploitation. This belief continues even though the South African political economy is a particularly distorted kind of `free enterprise' in comparison to Western economies. The way we see the world is obviously, therefore, shaped by our class positions (where we fit into the relations of production - workers, managers/ supervisors or owners), history, language and culture and whether or not we have benefitted from the prevailing system.

If we now thread the above concepts through that of ideology, we are in a position to reconstitute these terms in more meaningful and useful ways. Propaganda in this view becomes secondary to ideology and is used only as a last resort. Where ideology services the maintenance and cohesion of an existing hegemony, propaganda operates mainly when hegemony breaks down. Propaganda occurs in those instances in which the semantic grid is no longer deemed sufficient to hold together a disintegrating social formation. In other words, propaganda can be conceptualised as the process of subverting discourse for the direct support of one or other of the major positions within the dominant ideologies.

When read through ideology, propaganda begins "to find an important and productive place in communications theory" (Selucky 1982:11). Despite its short-comings, and its dependence on the legacy of a static view of communication as transmission, it is possible to distinguish the broadly propagandistic from the less propagandistic. At the one end would be those media which employ a dogmatic and exhortationary mode of address, and directly support a particular position, while at the other is the integration of that position, however closely framed, into the wider (though always structured) ideological field of voices, narratives, meanings and reportage (1).

Let me first explain ideology with reference to another film on labour relations, A World of Difference. Made for the Chamber of Mines, this film so totally misrepresented the social psychology of mine workers that it exacerbated already difficult management-labour relations and was withdrawn from circuit. The basic problem with the film stemmed from the unconscious ideological assumptions of the film's makers and sponsor. The conventional documentary codes used automatically located white supervisors and management as `superior' to black miners.

In one scene, for example, a low angle shot of white miners approaching seated black miners makes the whites threateningly dominant in the frame. In contrast, the blacks come across as sullen and lacking respect: the image is one of confrontation with whites ascendant. This social/racial hierarchy had been made to appear `natural' (ie. given the force of objective reality). While the film makers took this formalist set of signs and codes for granted, the camera angles, framing and movement, together with the editing style, music and effects, totally alienated the black mine workers whose own class and labour experiences led them to reject the view of themselves as presented to themselves by the white film makers and mine owners. In other words, images that seemed natural and the common sense way of seeing things to the makers of the film were interpreted as propaganda and white arrogance by the black miners.

Though the film's makers thought that they had done `a good job', they simply infuriated the target audiences - black miners. The title itself, A World of Difference, encodes racist assumptions, while the way in which the film communicated management's concern about inappropriate black-white labour relations had the unintended effect of reaffirming to the black miners management's insensitivity and insincerity.

While miscommunication, resulting from a particular ideological view, is never the intention of a film's sponsors, it is very often the effect on target audiences, whose experience has generated counter-ideologies or ways of making sense of, and coping with, the world. What is unintentionally encoded as misinformation is interpreted as cynical propaganda. It should not be thought that because blacks have less opportunity of seeing films or that they come from mainly oral (rather than visual) cultures, that they are unable to identify and decode the dominant ideological elements in films or TV (Tomaselli 1985:5-7).

Dominant meanings (those constantly propagated and legitimised in the media) such as those found in A World of Difference are constructed through semantic engineering of terms, words and images which favour definitions and interpretations issuing from the state and/or capital. Dominant ideology, then, is the semantic grid which offers the parameters within which people are encouraged to make sense of their objective conditions of existence. The content of the grid may bear little relationship to actual conditions -- one's view of the world is never exact, it is largely imaginary. Thousands of billions of rands/roubles/dollars may go into constructing preferred visions of social reality only to eventually result in complete societal collapse because, no matter how institutionally concrete a repressive system is made -- eg. apartheid, communism, dictatorship -- majority popular aspirations will eventually break through the cracks in the system. Conversely, counter-ideologies which negotiate or reject dominant ideologies may develop as a reaction to these, and the oppression they justify. In South Africa this trajectory may well take the country in a path towards socialism no matter its failure in the former Soviet bloc.

The concept of discourse is useful in understanding the relationship between texts (media, messages) and contexts (social practices). `Discourse' is `a mode of talking' that belongs to and derives from the social domain. `Military discourse' is one specific instance, racism and sexism are others. In South Africa, apartheid discourse was propagated through close cooperation between the government, SABC (specifically its Language Services Bureau), the Bureau for Information, the National Party supporting Afrikaans Press Groups, some elements within the English- liberal Press, and education departments. As information, discourse must be interpreted, at which point it becomes a thing, a noun: it finds outlets in commodities: research data, intelligence, news, TV, data bases, textbooks, business publications, premier rate telephone lines, government reports, etc (Peters 1988:16).

Authors of dominant ideas transmitted through media shape perceptions of audiences in conjunction with other social institutions. Five types of discursive organisation which intensified in the era of total strategy are applicable to this analysis:

1. Restriction determines who may speak, on what and how much may be said, on what occasion. This is not only seen in censorship, coercion or repression. Restriction also operates through subtle rights and protocols governing social relationships. A reporter on the Sunday Times, for example, would be tempting the wrath of his/her editor were s/he to write favourably on socialism. Similarly, the writer of an uncritical pro-capitalist article in New Nation would soon learn that paper's preferred discourse. On Indaba Ye Grievance, white supervisors wanted to restrict the film from being shown to blacks because it gave voice to their, rather than supervisors', `ideas'.

2. Shielding protects discourse from intrusion and contamination of potentially dangerous points of view. This is done through `authorization' where certain dominantly positioned individuals define preferred agendas. Editors and journalists are interpreters of `primary definers' -- top businessmen and women in the mass media and the intellectuals of capital. These definers are nominated by the media because they express support for capitalist solutions. Examples are Leon Louw, Clem Sunter, Raymond Parsons and others who become media Knowns and whose opinions are preferred over more critical `authors', or those with opposing arguments.

Where oppositional Knowns like Joe Slovo are interviewed, they are belittled such that however intelligent their arguments, the way they are framed by the reporting medium undermines their integrity. One merely has to recall how John Bishop turns SABC-TV's Agenda into a circus by trivialising intelligent questions posed by audience members. Bishop then rearticulates the questions as clichés which he barks at Slovo while simultaneously pressurising him over the length and depth of his reply.

3. The delimited appropriation of discourse compartmentalises and fragments permissible content into certain contexts. Each discourse has its own appropriate place and time. For example, on SABC, prior to the unbanning of the ANC, all UDF-related `unrest' actions were reported by the crime reporter, NOT the political reporter. In this way, the ANC/UDF was criminalised while the Congress' political and diplomatic activities were suppressed from public view.

Similarly, reports on labour unrest rarely appear on the finance pages of newspapers. Rather they are found in the labour columns or printed as general news. News is thus fragmented into symbolic complexes and the interconnections between them often lost (Therborn 1980).

4. The appropriation of discourse extracts terms and slogans from oppositional or 'enemy' discourses, turning them to tactical advantage. The government, for example, appropriated the term `alternative media' from the Mass Democratic Movement. It recast the term as `so-called alternative media', and from 1985 to 1989 targeted the entire anti-apartheid press through inclusion of the alternative press into the Press as a whole. In this way, even liberal-conservative newspapers like the Sunday Tribune were on occasions identified as part of the total onslaught.

5. Repetition involves endlessly repeated assertions until they become self-perpetuating and obvious truths. The mainstream media are especially important in setting the agenda for the public discourse -- journalists are sucked into the discourse, and eventually reproduce it unconsciously. These preferred messages become an almost biologically naturalised way of talking. Through incessant repetition of the dominant discourse or `hooray' words like `capitalism', `free enterprise', `individual initiative', `privatisation' etc., the media privilege and naturalise the interests of the dominant sections of our society.

Conversely, through `boo' words like `communist', `socialist', `nationalisation', `redistribution', `Slovo' and so on, only the state and its business allies `authorize' themselves to comment intelligently on these `discredited' ideas.

Having delimited who may speak about what in which setting, further devices can be mobilised to socially construct specific organisations as the `enemy'. This is done through the identification of folk devils, 'demonisation' of organisations and the causing of moral panics which sweep through society (Cohen 1972). Prior to the Wiehan and Riekert Commissions, trade unions were cast as and folk devils -- portrayed by the state and business (and even some workers) as incarnations of evil and inhumanity which were without conscience in their single-minded determination to overthrow stable economies. So successful was the government's disinformation which cast the ANC as a communist folk devil that FW de Klerk now faces the dilemma of how to rehabilitate the ANC to justify to his own constituency his current negotiating position -- ie. negotiating with the `communist' architects of the `total onslaught'.

The ensuing panic by white conservatives was predicated upon the common sense (or misinformation) that economic slavery and dehumanisation would result under an ANC government. A moral panic, then, is a "mobilization of public opinion, the orchestration by the media and public figures of an otherwise inchoate sense of unease" (Cohen 1972:xxiv). The CP made excellent use of folk devils and moral panics during the run-up to the 1992 referendum by labelling the ANC and all non-Inkatha blacks as communists, using the previous discourse of the National Party to terrify gullible whites who couldn't tell the difference between `nation', `ethnicity', race, racial and racism.

The reason why people are so susceptible to certain messages, rather than others is because of the relationship between their existing interests and the way messages are organised, structured and communicated in terms of pre-given `real-life' linguistic codes which work at subliminal levels. The codes reproduced on television, for example, are stereotyped convincingly because they are commonly used in other social interactions, which reinforce common sense interpretations of events.

I have identified certain processes which have shaped (white) `public' interpretations vis-a-vis groups like the ANC, and systems like socialism. The layers of signification so constructed, however, do not unproblematically determine that messages will be interpreted exactly in terms of the intentions of those who construct messages. Sometimes an oppositional decoding occurs; sometimes confusion results and often the message is simply rejected.

Some final points about how people make sense of their worlds (see Hall 1980):

* The first is one where the reader interprets the message in terms of the writer's intentions. This occurs without the reader being aware that the message is a CONSTRUCT created within the codes and rules of meaning structuring. This position takes the encoded message for granted in the same way as someone looking through a transparent window does not see the window frame or the glass but only the content beyond it. Such people will believe anything that coincides with their world views or ideology. The sponsors of A World of Difference released the film on this basis, but withdrew it when they realised that what was information in their eyes was interpreted as propaganda by the miners. They thus moved from this transparent first level of decoding to the second, an interpretation which negotiated the code.

* Negotiating the code occurs when readers acknowledge as legitimate the taken-for-granted code which contains the message but question aspects of the way the message has been constructed. Certain managers/supervisors who evaluated Indaba Ye Grievance responded at this level -- one said that seeing the way workers lived in the film made him "skoon hartseer" [extremely heartsore] (Godsell 1985:21), while another said: "I saw workers as human - they are not usually portrayed like this". A third appreciated the film, "you can see the problems from both sides", though none agreed that the film should be shown to the workers themselves -- none offered a real reason for this.

The explanation is to be found in the workings of ideology which restricted discussion of alternatives with the workers themselves and delimited the discourse of what was seen to be resistance to some site (or no site at all) other than the workplace. The dominant ideological practice of managers still wanting to totally control the communication process in terms of their perceptions undermined the potential dialogue for which the film was originally designed. In other words, they were uneasy with the idea of open communication because the kind of communication used by workers (singing, gesticulating, dancing etc) was not interpreted as `communication' or dialogue but as `incitement' leading to "unrest" (Godsell 1985:31). Conversely, the workers saw the benefit of the film for themselves, supervisors and the company.

* The third response is when the reader understands both the literal and connotative inflections given a message but decodes it in a totally different way. This was the response by the black miners to A World of Difference and some managers who saw Indaba Ye Grievance, who found an anti-white anti-management bias in the latter film.

Dialogical communication facilitates a bottom-up flow of messages -- which occurred in Indaba Ye Grievance as workers translated their experiences into film through recreating actual incidents through performance. Film is a very difficult and expensive medium to use in dialogical communication. However, during the 1980s, because of global capital's need for rapid world-wide interactive communication, multinational companies developed electronic communications technologies able to facilitate both global and local mass-dialogical communication, ranging from E-Mail, through video and print.

The challenge for South Africa is to develop models through which the technologies and opportunities of the Information Age can be used to reconnect people with one another, urban and rural, rich and poor, and in which community is understood in its theological rather than its apartheid or business senses. This can be done through the creation of public spheres from national to local levels and through interest groups within the firm itself. `Communication', `access, `participation' and `community' are parts of a unified development process, connecting the concerns of local public spheres to questions of development.

In conclusion, with reference to my opening quote, if this country is to escape its past, it will be necessary to break with the idea of `wrong' and `right' audiences. The assumptions of propaganda that receivers from the working classes are passive, malleable, emotional and irrational, incapable of handling certain kinds of messages, derives from considerations of power, fear of loss of authority and certainly in the South African case, racism.

People must be encouraged to speak for themselves. The idea that management or the state represent to oppressed groups what it is thought they think is not communication -- but rather domination. When governments and social institutions prevent communication, they are also sowing the seeds of political and economic decay - one needs look no further than the former Soviet Union and apartheid South Africa to see the consequences.

Notes

1. I am indebted to Ruth Tomaselli for these insights.

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