ANC wishes to exercise political control of the media via a media appeals tribunal. It could be claimed that the ruling party’s argument for diversity and transformation is a spurious one, that it is self-serving and a disguise for its more insidious intentions of controlling the free flow of information and criticism. Readers of newspapers in fact have pointed to arguments for diversity as a ‘guise’ to mask the ANC’s efforts to control and limit the role of the media. The extract below from a letter to The Times shows how one reader responded.
It is an open secret that the ANC realises that its inevitable decline in power and control of the country has arrived, now the only option it has is to close access to information. It is not by coincidence that the Protection of Information Bill and the media appeals tribunal are being proposed simultaneously (The Times: 16 August 2010).
Is this concentration of ownership an unprogressive hegemony?
Four big companies own the lion’s share of the commercial print media. This concentration of ownership does not translate into four views in the media, as is sometimes implied by the ANC. I will argue that this assumption reflects reductionist logic and is a simplistic and inaccurate answer to the question of the concentration of ownership. The ruling party uses the concentration of media ownership to try to limit the free space of the media. The stranglehold of big media companies has provided a platform for the government to initiate laws and policies under the guise of development, transformation, protection of privacy and state security, which threaten to close the discursive spaces for open criticism germane to developing a democratic culture and society.
There are different ways of looking at what ‘diversity’ means in relation to concentration of ownership. In response to the long-held belief that ownership and control of commercial media translate into determination of content, Thabo Leshilo, the veteran journalist, then columnist at The Times and public editor at Avusa Media, argued: ‘The idea that such concentration of ownership is a threat to democracy is far-fetched and can only succeed in inflaming passions’ (Sunday Times: 8 November 2009). He pointed out that the big four did not form a news cartel. ‘They all compete fiercely for market share, even to the point of wanting to kill one another’s titles’ he argued. Leshilo was responding to the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA), a section 21 company set up by the government in the new democracy to investigate media ownership and lack of diversity. The stated aims of the MDDA were to give adequate space to women, children and people with disabilities, and for the self-regulatory mechanism for newspapers to be aligned with legislation. Leshilo explained that in South Africa there was little correlation between shareholders and the stories that appeared in papers, radio or television. Nic Dawes, editor of the Mail & Guardian, made the same point: ‘Editors I know and respect would resign if given instructions by management, advertising and shareholders on what news content should be. In all major SA newsrooms, at least those that I know of, they keep a strict Chinese wall between advertising and editorial’ (cited in Daily Maverick: 2 October 2010).
Leshilo wrote: ‘What shareholders care about is the return on their investment. They do not scrutinise papers to check if they do a good job on covering women or people with disabilities, for example’ (Sunday Times: 8 November 2009). In South Africa, he further expounded, shareholders appoint a board, which appoints management, which then appoints editors. While Leshilo conceded that papers could do a better job of covering marginalised communities, women and children, it was not for a government agency to be policing newspapers or the news. He added that some methods proposed at the MDDA meeting were hugely problematic:
They betrayed a veiled desire by representatives of government, state organs and the ruling alliance to impose their own set of values on society and determine what is acceptable to publish. Their suggestion to resuscitate debate on the ANC’s ill-conceived idea of subjecting independent media, privately funded media to a state media tribunal or some other government agency is a dead-giveaway of their intentions (Sunday Times: 8 November 2009).
In theoretical terms, what Leshilo was describing was the unprogressive hegemony of the ANC and the attempted closure of media spaces. A government agency, wanting more diversity to sympathetically reflect the concerns of neglected rural people, blacks, women, children and people with disabilities, is deployed as a disguise for more political control of the media. This constitutes an unprogressive hegemony in disguise as openness, which would ironically limit and hinder free speech and freedom of expression – hallmarks of what is required to sustain democracy – even more than the so-called concentration of ownership. Attesting to this view would be the following point made by Mondli Makhanya en passant in an interview conducted in 2008: ‘Cyril Ramaphosa has greeted me a few times as we’ve passed each other by on the escalator, not once has he called me in for a chat, nor has he visited me in my office … ’. Yet Ramaphosa is one of the owners of his newspaper. While the area of ownership and media concentration is not the focus of my argument, I have raised it here to show that there are different ways of looking at diversity. In particular, the argument for a direct relationship, or even a correlation, between ownership and journalistic freedom of expression, is too reductionist and conflates ownership with control of information and opinion dissemination. Moreover, it does not add up to the real experience of journalists within a particular newspaper. This is not to deny that the world of journalism is affected by profit motives of owners, as the closure of newspapers suggests, nor is it to deny that rural areas are inadequately covered and that the majority of newspapers have a middle class bias. In addition, the new world of technology has made the old world of newspapers struggle for its space. The traditional media world has been subjected to significant competition, an onslaught, if you like, over the last decade, with the wave of new technology that has rolled in to compete for its space. However, as media analyst Paula Fray pointed out in an interview in March 2008, if you remove cell phones from the equation of new media only a small percentage of South Africans have access to the Internet: ‘Fewer than ten per cent of adult South Africans surf the Internet but its impact is still significant,’ she said, but technology has certainly changed the way our children consume information:
Increasingly news needs to be more interactive, shorter, targeted and media now face the challenge of building relationships with their online users. The flood of information on the Internet actually promotes targeted media because people are looking for products that serve their needs. In the last year particularly, I’ve seen the online websites of print products become more interactive and multi-media.
Fray observed that the traditional world of the media was changing from one in which media meant radio, television and newspapers, to an expanded view which embraced a range of technology, including the Internet. In this new technological age the consumption of information has spread and expanded. Despite rapid technological changes, the question of who has access to these developments remains. The former Weekly Mail editor and the first journalist in South Africa to begin publishing online, Irwin Manoim, commented on the results of Internet usage in South Africa in the wealth trends survey in Gauteng (Sunday Times: 22 June 2008). His research showed that 493 000 people had accessed the Internet over the four-week monitoring period; twenty-one per cent of them had read the news online, and eleven per cent had read a daily paper online. Manoim commented that the wealthy were probably reading business news online, which the Internet provided as it unfolded, but which print can only provide the next day. ‘Internet news can be read on your office computer while you are working. It even prompts you when news that is of interest to you comes up,’ he said.
While this was the trend in the upper end of the wealth scale, or living standards measure, the Gauteng Wealth Survey also showed that printed news was doing better than ever at the lower popular tabloid end of the market (Sunday Times: 22 June 2008), reflecting the same trend in other developing countries in Africa and the East, for example China and India. Nevertheless, South Africa’s newspapers were affected by the global economic recession of 2008 and the move away from advertising in print to advertising on the Internet, which is cheaper according to Manoim. Many newspapers and magazines have closed down. For example, Maverick magazine
