Last week the man who buys everything met the man who’s prepared to sell anything – and South Africa was jerked into the no-holds-barred world of global media monopolies. Few people stopped to consider the implications of the deal secretly brokered by Louis Luyt, sometime dealer in fertiliser, newspapers, beer and politics, and Rupert Murdoch, the chequebook emperor of world media. Our own media were far too busy with the campaign to stop Jonah Lomu on the left wing to pay much attention to Murdoch thundering up the right wing, flashing the world’s biggest chequebook and driven by a seemingly insatiable desire for bigger and better deals that give him ever-greater media power.
You have to admire Murdoch’s cleverness, vision and courage. He combines — uniquely — an extraordinary foresight into global media trends with an ability and willingness to throw massive amounts of money at projects. Murdoch and Luyt, true to form, picked their moment carefully to spring the deal on South Africa, with broadcast legislation still in flux and British selectors ready to grab South Africa’s best players for their professional league. The chances of stopping Murdoch seem slim: a claim that Luyt acted in breach of an agreement with M-Net, and a very vague possibility of a Constitutional Court challenge.
Much is at stake. When you sit in front of your TV watching the 1997 Currie Cup contest, you will be doing so by grace of Rupert Murdoch. Either he will have secured his own South African TV channel by then, which you will be able to watch if you can afford a satellite dish and monthly subscriptions; or the SABC will have shelled out a substantial chunk of its taxpayer- bolstered budget to buy the coverage from Murdoch’s
The losers are the rugby fans, and those administrators whose first concern is with barefoot rugby players in township streets rather than Adidas-clad players at Ellis Park. It took the World Cup to put South African rugby on the road to becoming a national sport — and the progress made in this regard could be wiped out if watching rugby is to become the privilege of the satellite dish-owning class
We’re going to lose much more than rugby. An onslaught of the kind of lowest-common-denominator media that Murdoch prides himself in, coming before our own national broadcasting situation is sorted out and competitive, will probably mean a stillborn local television industry, swamped by the power of international satellite trash.
