Apartheid Media: Disinformation and Dissent in South Africa

This book is about South Africa and racism, but it is also about the United States, the media, and freedom of expression across the globe. In Apartheid Media, John Phelan's portrait of the press and politics in South Africa emerges as the intimate face of a universal war between disinformation and dissent, propaganda and truth, state control and individual rights that is being fought on the screens and pages of the world. Through telling anecdote and cross-cultural analysis, Phelan demonstrates that the white South African regime's downward spiral into despotism is a cautionary tale for the United States. Both nations, he argues, share a similar moral and legal heritage of universal freedom; both have a legacy of racism. In South Africa, as in the United States, he observes, the conflict between the principle of political liberty and the practice of inequality comes to a boil in the freedom of speech and of the press. Using this parallel, the author illuminates for us the threat and the promise of modern communications.