a re-evaluation of related concepts within the spectrum of journalistic ethics, as well as a revamp of media accountability mechanisms.
Chapter 10 makes case for ‘listening journalism’, which is an already well-established concept in media and communications theory, but which has been largely ignored in practice, both by media critics, academics and researchers and by the news media industry. The in-depth investigation and reportage on each of the three selected communities presented in this book serves as an example of listening journalism/research in practice, as it could be applied more broadly by the press, and as an example of how to retell stories from the ground in a way that does not further marginalise poor communities but gives them a legitimate voice in the public sphere. Lastly, the chapter addresses the need to encourage a realignment of the paradigms governing the journalistic profession, the manner in which journalists are taught and trained within the higher education environment, and offers a set of practical guidelines for working journalists wishing to engage in meaningful listening journalism.
THE AUDIENCE-CENTRED APPROACH
The research performed for this book was commissioned by the Media Policy and Democracy Project (MPDP) and funded by the Open Society Foundation for South Africa and the Women in Research grant provided by the University of South Africa (UNISA). The MPDP was launched in 2012 and is a South African-based research collective, administrated jointly between the Department of Communication Science at UNISA and the Department of Journalism, Film and Television at the University of Johannesburg. It aims to promote participatory media and communications policymaking in the public interest.
Since its launch, the MPDP has collaborated with academics and researchers from various institutions throughout South Africa and the world. The MPDP has also collaborated with civil society organisations and social justice movements, which have a specific focus on media and communications policymaking, and which have a central concern for the public interest and a ground-up audience-based approach to research and policy interventions. Part of the work of the MPDP includes consultation with national media policymakers, including parliament, in order to inject media policymaking processes with informed, evidence-based research that holds a concern for the public interest at its core. The combined and collective efforts of MPDP researchers has contributed to policymaking involving media and internet freedom, public service broadcasting and digital terrestrial television, journalistic ethics and accountability systems, including press regulation, mass communications surveillance and privacy, as well as media diversity and transformation.
Central to this research collective is an untraditional mode of performing research developed by the MPDP, the audience-centred approach. In a manner that is dissimilar to Northern-developed research practices, the audience-centred approach regards the audience, the media end user, the ordinary person on the ground as primary and central to the research effort (Duncan and Reid 2013; Reid 2017a, 2018a). Each of our research efforts begins by taking the perspective of the audience/grassroots citizen as its point of departure. The audience-centred approach is not a research methodology; it is a research attitude. Our methodologies are multiple and vary because in each case they will depend entirely on the direction received from a particular ground-up departure point and the specificities of each contextual situation relative to the relationship this bears with the media or communications landscape.
For the most part, the trajectory of media policymaking is directed by those with the power and means to do so, whether they are media owners and stakeholders, corporate capital, elites in government or political circles or media regulators. As a ground-up approach to research and media policymaking, the audience-centred approach inverts the traditional top-down power axis, and operates according to the understanding that the media audience is the primary point of departure and ought to direct the progression of policymaking and research.
Clearly, the audience-centred approach can be comfortably situated within the broader context and discourse of decolonial approaches to scholarship, particularly within media studies. Our primary aim in this book is not to offer new theoretical contributions to the decolonial debate on scholarship and research, but rather to present a practical example of what such approaches may look like in practice. While the transformative trajectory of decolonial discourse on teaching, learning, training and research holds immeasurable value, much of this debate remains on a theoretical, general and somewhat abstract level. We attest that actively listening to what grassroots communities have to say, and taking their stories seriously, is one way in which to move beyond traditional Western epistemologies.
We adopt the audience-centred approach because firstly and as social scientists, we have a moral obligation to do so; and secondly, because the audience-centred approach centres its efforts on a respect for the dignity of voice(s); and thirdly, because it just makes sense: if we want to research the media, then surely the best place to start is with the peoples whom the media ought to exist for. And if not for the audience/media end users, then what or who is the media for? Further, and more acutely, without the audience/media end users, would the media even have a purpose? Simply, the media exits because of the audience. How then can we operate if the audience and its voice(s) are anything but central?
PART 1
FROM THE INSIDE: VOICE(S) FROM THE GROUND
Figure 2.1: Map of South Africa showing the three communities that provide the case studies: Xolobeni/Amadiba, Glebelands, and Thembelihle
CHAPTER
2
Community Perspective, Experience and Voice
Julie Reid and Dale T. McKinley
Asmall number of mostly independent news outlets acknowledge that the real ‘experts’ on any particular news story are the people whose lives are most impacted by the events and situations that the stories describe. The Global Press Journal employs reporters who are based within the community about which they report, recognising the value of journalism that is informed by an understanding of local languages, local customs and contexts, and local histories, so that information is framed in a culturally and contextually appropriate way.
Managing editor of the Global Press Journal, Krista Kapralos (2018) describes what she terms the ‘reliability gap’: a phenomenon in dominant news journalism where predominantly Western media groups and news outlets collect and represent data and evidence based on Western normative standards, regardless of whether the situation being reported on is geographically or culturally Western. Kapralos (2018) adds:
When one culture sets the standard for truth (and implements that standard regardless of location), the narratives that culture culls from other places are likely to be warped … For many research and news agencies, the process of gathering data results in a continual confrontation between Western assumptions and non-Western cultures. While that reality makes the truth less convenient to find, there is a huge potential payoff for those who seek it in context: A meaningful negotiation between equal partners who can respectfully create systems to help determine what is true. At Global Press Journal, we believe it’s difficult – if not impossible – to determine the truth without engaging local people. Every story we publish is reported by a local person. Every story includes sources who are as close as possible to the situations described. And reporters are supported by a robust editorial team dedicated to accuracy.
The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, insists that media outlets ought to be much more representative of the societies they aim to represent. A survey conducted in the United Kingdom revealed that a privately educated elite still dominates that country’s journalism profession, and that journalism has revealed
