To get one thing clear at the outset, I admired Nelson Mandela.
I am also astonished and bored by the outpouring of flannel and hagiographies at his death. A serviceable but dull BBC4 programme about Byzantium on Friday night was interrupted by a banner advertising "Breaking news on BBC1". Was nuclear armageddon upon us? Was a tsunami roaring up the Mersey estuary? No. Mandela had died.
I can't think of any reason why I should have needed to know sooner rather than later. After all, the coverage was still going on on Monday morning, when Radio 5 was inviting listeners to share their "memories of Mandela". There was no chance of any of us missing the news. You might have thought the station had been renamed Radio Mandela; apparently the BBC has received over 1000 complaints about excessive coverage. I'm surprised it's so few.
Against my better judgment I watched News at 10 that night. Too many of the contributors struck the kind of solipsistic tone which Private Eye would satirise as "The day Nelson Mandela met me". Among them was John Simpson, who is experienced enough to know the pitfalls of personalisation but let his vanity get the better of him. In the Guardian of course it was even worse, although the paper redeemed itself by printing a magisterial obituary by David Beresford which you can read here, and which I urge anyone who thinks I'm unduly cynical to look at before giving up on this post.
As Beresford makes clear, Mandela was a complex man, absent from the world during much of his adult life, emerging from prison an ingenue, and finding himself the poster boy for liberal opinion the world over. This was a position he subsequently struggled to justify, with one striking exception, an exception so startling that it goes a long way to explaining the reverence felt for Mandela around the world.
It was that he forgave his captors, and by doing so made possible the peaceful transition to majority rule in South Africa. No small thing.
But news organisations are not meant to be cheerleaders. When a great public figure like Mandela passes on, their job isn't to exalt. I don't imagine though that Pravda's tributes to Josef Stalin were any more lavish than those the liberal media bestowed on Madiba.
Nowhere in the coverage I saw was there any mention of his penchant for hobnobbing with celebrities, his attempts to milk the rich for unspecific "good causes" (some of which appeared to have close connections to his own family), his cosying up to foreign governments like Indonesia, Taiwan and Nigeria in exchange for donations to the ANC or his reluctance to speak out about AIDS. Neither was there any mention of Mandela's endorsement, while still in prison, of Winnie Mandela's notorious necklacing speech - Beresford's obit alleges that proof of this endorsement was removed from journalist Anthony Sampson's official biography when Mandela threatened to withdraw co-operation from the project.
None of these things make Mandela more of a bad man than a good one. Neither does the corruption of his successors in the ANC make his legacy toxic. But their absence from the news coverage shames journalists' professionalism.
How could this have happened?
Most of us on who grew up politically in the 70s and 80s worshipped Mandela. He appeared to stand for something decent and true, yet was unjustly imprisoned for fighting against something hateful and false. For we white liberals, he was a black man who was palpably westernised (a lawyer). His words at the Rivonia trial had the authoritative ring of Shakespeare and the King James Bible (not surprisingly since Mandela was assisted in his speech by the novelist Nadime Gordimer and by Anthony Sampson).
Growing up in a society which was learning to cope with black immigration, we young white people could admire Mandela from afar. He gave us the luxury of demonstrating our own Anti-Racism, whilst not actually having to have anything to do with him personally. Moreover because he was imprisoned, we had no opportunity to find out whether our idol had feet of clay or not.
My generation is now in charge in the media. When someone who was totemic for our far off youth dies, we are going to go for it in a big way. Does anyone remember the fanfares which accompanied Lou Reed's passing a few weeks ago?
The coverage of Mandela's death reveals as clearly as any story in recent years that what appears in the news media, both in quality and quantity, is a reflection of the personal history and opinions of the journalists and editors involved. Most of the time it's easy to forget this, but the coverage of Mandela's death reminds us that it's true, and it's true all of the time.
P.S. The sight of the bogus sign-language expert gesticulating next to that old fraud Jacob Zuma at Mandela's funeral said a great deal about the quality of the people who have risen to the top in the new South Africa. In a sentence, I'd say that a wicked regime has been replaced by one which is incompetent and corrupt.
