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3.

The media’s challenges: legislation and commercial imperatives

The Protection of Information Bill currently before Parliament is meant to replace an apartheid-era law dating from 1982 … it would virtually shield the government from the scrutiny of the independent press and criminalise activities essential to investigative journalism, a vital public service.¹

This chapter first examines specifically how the legislative apparatus left over from the apartheid period hindered the work of journalists but remained because it suited the democratically elected leaders of the post-apartheid era. Then, it examines how the growing uses of technology, coupled with commercial imperatives, affect the media’s role in a democracy. The argument here is that these forms of subjection and interference have had a negative impact on the ‘free’ and ‘independent’ media. Then there is the raft of legislation that has an impact on journalism, and, specifically, the ANC’s efforts to promote and explain its insidious creation, the Protection of State Information Bill (Secrecy Bill) through which, as the US media body, the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in the opening quotation, the activities of the independent press would be criminalised while the government of the day would be shielded from scrutiny if this had to be enacted.

The chapter proceeds to an overview of the South African media, to provide details of how it has grown from a small and narrow set of players three decades ago to the more diverse, amorphous and fluid media landscape in the new dispensation – although it also shows the shifts from concentration of media ownership to fragmentation and then back again. The chapter then describes the legal conditions under which journalists have to operate and how, in some instances, the laws have changed to accommodate the free flow of information while, in others, the legislation is deliberately obstreperous: The Promotion of Access to Information Act of 2000, for example, stands in stark contrast to the Protection of State Information Bill, which went before Parliament in July 2010 and again in September 2010, then again in November 2010, and was then passed by the National Assembly in 2011 before amendments were made in May 2012, which included a public interest defence. But then these were withdrawn in June 2012.

The chapter then looks at commercial imperatives and new media and the impact this has had, and continues to have, on the world of traditional journalism. It also shows how the meaning of the term ‘media’ has changed – from the traditional sphere of television, radio and newspapers providing the public with information and a public sphere for debate and analysis, to a broader view that encompasses citizen journalism, blogging, online publishing, and social networking sites, as well as cellphone technology used to pass on news to fellow citizens and to the traditional media.

Nick Davies is a journalist at The Guardian newspaper in London. His 2009 book, Flat Earth News, which subjects the profession to critical scrutiny, argues that journalism has been short-changed throughout the world. Owing to subjection by commercial imperatives, newsrooms have been slashed to half their original size in some cases, and desk journalism (where reporters sit at their desks ‘dialing a quote’ rather than venturing out to the site of the scene or to interview someone personally) is all-pervasive. Journalists write more stories in less time, with no time to check the facts, and they often regurgitate press releases from public relations companies. It amounts to what Davies calls ‘churnalism’ (2009: 70), stories churned out mindlessly from press releases, with the deadline rather than the accuracy of the facts in mind. While Davies’s research is based primarily in the United Kingdom there are interesting overlaps with (and differences from) the situation in South Africa, as this chapter will show. Indeed, Anton Harber observes in the introduction to the book Troublemakers: The Best of South Africa’s Investigative Journalism (2010), edited jointly with Margaret Renn, that there has indeed been a juniorisation of newsrooms, with age and experience levels having dropped in the post-apartheid era. He argues, however, that this romanticises journalism under apartheid, suggesting that some unspecified universal high standard of journalism was set, while it is debatable that coverage was then more accurate or substantial. The chapter then turns to the South African media landscape, with a particular emphasis on newspapers, and examines concentration of ownership, state interventions, and commercial imperatives, arguing that these are all different kinds of pressures which, it can be argued, are subjections.

The South African media landscape: an unprogressive concentration of media therefore a lack of diversity?

The claim that there is too much concentration of media ownership necessarily means a lack of diversity and, in turn, a need for state intervention to curb media excesses is a spurious one. My argument expresses the contrary: that the media is amorphous and fluid, lacking in unity and cohesion, with as many opinions as there are journalists in a newsroom. There is no one ideological agenda in ‘the media’, and journalists, by and large, exercise agency and act within the codes and ethics of their profession.

The media grew significantly in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and again from 2000 to 2007. What the figures below highlight is the growth from a small, narrow field of operators to a broader more diverse terrain. The media in 2007 consisted of seventy-one television stations, whereas in 2000 there were fifty-six, and in 1975 there were none. Similar growth trends can be seen in the number of radio stations. In 2007, there were 124 radio stations, in 2000 there were 105, and in 1975 there were seven. In March 2010, the Media Club South Africa website estimated that about 14.5 million South Africans buy the urban dailies, while community newspapers have a circulation of 5.5 million. There were twenty-two daily and twenty-five weekly urban newspapers in South Africa in 2010. In 2011, the state of newspapers showed these trends, according to The Media magazine of March 2012: newspaper distribution was double what it was in 1997, but there was a decline in the rate of growth over the last few years. Free community newspapers, however, have shown enormous growth: in 1997 there were 83 titles and in 2011 there were 195. While dailies’ numbers are up since 1997, they show a downward trend over the last four years, as Tony Banahan wrote in an article, ‘The figures don’t lie’ (The Media: March 2012). The following is a list of newspapers with sales and circulation figures from 2011.

• Beeld is an Afrikaans language daily, owned by Media 24, with copy sales of 36 754 and a total circulation of 76 321.

• Die Burger is an Afrikaans language daily paper, owned by Media 24, with copy sales of 35 680 with a total circulation of 78 901.

• Business Day is an English language daily owned by Business Day/Financial Mail in association with Avusa and the London-based Pearson, with copy sales of 8 532 and a total circulation of 36 103.

• Cape Argus is an English daily circulated in the Western Cape and is owned by the Independent Newspaper Group, with copy sales of 22 363 and a total circulation of 45 128.

• Cape Times is an English language daily, owned by the Independent Newspaper Group, with copy sales of 21 636 and a total circulation of 43 274.

• The Citizen is an English newspaper published six days a week, distributed in Gauteng and owned by Avusa/Caxton, with copy sales of 51 487 and a total circulation of 69 649.

• Daily Dispatch is an English newspaper in the Eastern Cape and is owned by Avusa, with copy sales of 22 634 and a total circulation of 22 394.

• Daily News is an English language daily based in KwaZulu-Natal and is owned by Independent Newspaper Group, with copy sales of 12 246 and a total circulation of 33 214.

• Daily Sun, the most-read newspaper in South Africa, distributed nationwide, is a tabloid owned by Media 24, with copy sales of 374 341 and total circulation of 374 400.

• Diamond Fields Advertiser is based in Kimberley in the Northern Cape and is owned by Independent Newspaper Group, with copy sales of 6 768 and a total circulation of 9 495.

• The Herald based in the Eastern Cape is one of the country’s oldest newspapers, launched in 1845, and is owned by Avusa, with copy sales of 15 178 and a total circulation of 22 139.

• Isolezwe is an isiZulu newspaper published Monday to Friday, based in KwaZulu-Natal, owned by Independent Newspaper Group, with copy sales of 105 713 and a total circulation of 106 734.

• Ilanga, owned by Independent Newspapers and distributed in KwaZulu-Natal, has copy sales of 135 359 and a total circulation of 135 706.

• Sondag is an Afrikaans newspaper owned by Media 24, with copy sales of 46 304 and a total circulation of 47 286.

• The Mercury is an English language Durban morning paper, owned by Independent Newspaper Group, with copy sales of 14 462 and a total circulation of 31 474.

• Pretoria News, an English daily based in Pretoria but also distributed in the provinces of Mpumalanga and North West, is owned by Independent Newspaper Group, with copy sales of 12 630 and a total circulation of 23 148.

• Sowetan is a daily English language newspaper aimed at a literate black readership, owned by Avusa, with copy sales of 86 892 and a total circulation of 116 347.

• The Star an English daily published in Johannesburg but circulated throughout the country is owned by Independent Newspaper Group, with copy sales of 58 321 and a total circulation of 136 552.

• The Times, one of South Africa’s newest papers, is an English language tabloid, the sister paper to the Sunday Times, owned by Avusa, with copy sales of 38 579 and a total circulation of 142 024.

• Volksblad is an Afrikaans language daily based in the Free State and is owned by Media 24, with copy sales of 13 169 and a total circulation of 21 353 for the daily edition.

• The Witness, an English language daily newspaper based in Pietermaritzburg, owned by Media 24, has copy sales of 8 971 and a total circulation of 21 908.

• The New Age is an English daily with sales and circulation figures unavailable.

The weekly newspapers:

• City Press is an English Sunday paper, owned by Media 24, with copy sales of 155 247 and a total circulation of 157 306.

• Saturday Star is a weekly, based in Johannesburg, owned by Independent Newspapers, with copy sales of 57 121 and a total circulation of 97 257.

• Independent on Saturday, owned by Independent Newspapers, has copy sales of 22 473 and a total circulation of 46 008.

• Isolezwe nge Sonto, owned by Independent Newspapers, has copy sales of 81 041 with a total circulation of 81 553.

• Ilanga Langesonto, owned by Independent Newspapers, is distributed in KwaZulu-Natal and has copy sales of 85 726 and a total circulation of 85 726.

• Mail & Guardian, owned by Mail & Guardian Media, has copy sales of 35 324 and a total circulation of 45 692.

• Post, owned by Independent Newspapers, has copy sales of 25 831 and a total circulation of 43 413.

• Soccer Laduma owned by Media 24, distributed nationwide but also in Botswana and Swaziland, has copy sales of 345 088 and a total circulation of 345 088.

• Rapport, owned by Media 24, has copy sales of 215 479 and a total circulation of 231 911.

• Sun, owned by Media 24, is an Afrikaans language Western Cape tabloid, with copy sales of 103 056 and a total circulation of 103 056.

• Sunday Independent, owned by Independent Newspaper Group, in Gauteng, Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Northern Province, has copy sales if 14 621 and a total circulation of 39 569.

• Son op Sondag is owned by Media 24; distribution is in the Eastern and Western Cape, with copy sales of 60 174 and a total circulation of 60 174.

• Sondag is owned by Media 24 and distributed in Gauteng, Free State, Northwest, Mpumalanga, Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal and Northern Cape, with copy sales of 46 304 and a total circulation of 47 286.

• Sunday Times, owned by Avusa, is distributed nationwide with copy sales of 253 721 and a total circulation of 451 361.

• Sunday Tribune is owned by Independent Newspaper Group, distributed in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, with copy sales 41 344 and a total circulation of 82 477.

• Sunday World, owned by Avusa, distributed in North West, Northern Cape, Free State, Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Limpopo, and Gauteng, has copy sales of 127 490 and a total circulation of 147 614.

• Weekend Post is owned by Avusa and distributed in Western Cape and Eastern Cape with copy sales of 19 899 and a total circulation of 23 656.

• Weekend Argus is owned by Independent Newspapers and distributed in the Western Cape with copy sales of 49 217 and a total circulation of 70 212.

• Weekend Witness, owned by Independent Newspapers and distributed in the greater Pietermaritzburg area, has copy sales of 12 549 and a total circulation of 21 908.

Some trends

In an analysis of the above list a number of different trends emerge, but I cannot focus here on all of them. While there is a variety of newspapers, the majority in English, they are geared towards different readerships. Some tabloids target niche markets, for example those interested in sex and scandal, as reflected, for instance, in the Sun. But although there are many newspapers there are very few owners. A point worth noting is that, according to Harber (2009) the growth of the Daily Sun suggests that the reading public is widening. The Daily Sun is the country’s biggest newspaper, aimed at black, working class people, offering local news and gossip, and focusing on the everyday lives and struggles of people rather than on intellectual debate. While the Daily Sun is the most widely read daily newspaper in the country, Harber said, daily papers aimed at an intellectual market, on the other hand, do not survive, and he provided the example of the attempt by the Weekly Mail in 1990 to launch a daily, the Daily Mail. This paper could not sustain itself and lack of funding meant that it met its demise less than two months after launching. ThisDay, a national intellectual daily to compete with The Star lasted a year, from October 2003 to October 2004, running up debts of up to R14 million (www.bizcommunity.com/article/196/90/4987). The problem was that neither was able to capture a sufficiently large advertising market or to reach a broad enough audience. The Weekender followed the same pattern as the Daily Mail and ThisDay when it shut down in November 2009. Business Day/Financial Mail (BDFM) launched the Weekender in March 2007. It serviced an intellectual readership, and at its second birthday in March 2009, according to the All Media and Products survey (AMPs) of 2009, the paper showed a significant following of 71 000 readers per issue. However, by November 2009 the management of BDFM closed the paper because of financial constraints. Again, it was a case of not enough advertising and not enough sales. In the meantime, at the lower end of the market the tabloid Daily Sun – launched by Media 24 in 2003 – sold 508 000 copies daily in March 2004, when it was not yet one year old (Harber 2009), and the AMPs survey showed growth from 1.4 million readers in 2003 to 3.4 million by 2005 (AMPs 2009).

A further trend, evidenced by the last point, is that newspaper readership’s decline has been arrested, according to the South African Advertising Research Foundation (Business Day: 1 April 2010). Newspaper sales stabilised, according to the research, and the number of South Africans reading newspapers had increased to 15.324 million, compared with the figure of 14.5 produced by Media Club South Africa in March 2010 cited earlier in this chapter. A fifth trend to be gleaned from the above listing of newspapers is that there is a concentration of ownership by four main players: Avusa, Independent Newspaper Group, Caxton and Media 24. This concentration cannot be a good thing. We need more media, we need a diverse media, and we need media where all voices, from all classes, races and genders are heard – but does this concentration translate into an unprogressive hegemony by big capital? There are far too many issues that are conflated in a discussion of media freedom in South Africa. According to the ANC, in a discussion document for its September 2010 NGC, ‘Free, independent and pluralistic media can only be achieved through not only many media products but by the diversity of ownership and control of media’ (ANC 2010). This is a curious statement, given that the 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 folded in October 2008, Ymag in November 2008, Enterprise magazine in December 2008, The Weekender in November 2009, and Femina, South Africa’s oldest women’s magazine, in February 2010. Before a more detailed discussion of the complex question of commercial imperatives and the intersection between media and democracy, this chapter now turns to an overview of the legislation, a severe form of subjection which hinders the work of journalists and the free flow of information, thus signifying significant closures for democracy.

State subjection via the law and civil society reaction

A free media is guaranteed in Section 16 of the Constitution under the principle of freedom of expression. The section reads:

16. Freedom of expression

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, which includes

a) freedom of the press and other media;

b) freedom to receive or impart information or ideas;

c freedom of artistic creativity; and academic freedom and freedom of scientific research.