In a blatant breach of international public broadcasting ethics, the SABC is screening promotional material which pretends to be educational, reports Justin Pearce
Thursday afternoon on CCV-TV. You’ve recently had a baby, so when you hear that toilet training is the subject of today’s A Guide to Health, you take notice. The programme starts with some advice on when and how to train your child, and moves on to explain how “training pants” — a cross between shorts and a nappy — are an important stage in the transition away from nappydom. Then comes the punchline: “An excellent product is Huggies Pull-Ups training pants.”
The 10-minute slot continues in a similar vein, with at least two direct references to Huggies Pull-Ups in the midst of what sounds like objective advice.
It tells how children might become frustrated if they can’t exercise the required degree of bowel control, and informs you that “Huggies Pull-Ups help to alleviate this frustration”.
A Guide to Health, broadcast twice a week on CCV, is one of the more blatant examples of programmes which plug products under the guise of neutral advice. In other cases, the product promotion is slightly more subtle: for example, The TV Dentist on TV1 appears in front of a poster advertising Dentazyme toothpaste. While the product is not mentioned in the voiceover, when viewers are advised to “use a good toothpaste”, this coincides with film footage of someone brushing their teeth with Dentazyme.
All the SABC officials who spoke to the Mail & Guardian — including chief executive Zwelakhe Sisulu — agreed that the punting of commercial products under the guise of educational material was not a good practice. Many were surprised to hear such programmes had been screened, claiming not to know about the product
Sisulu said the SABC is in the process of reviving its code of ethics. But several officials appear to support a conditional approach to ethics, saying that the need to fund educational programmes must be taken into
Others said the first priority was to keep education programmes on the air — and that punting the products of sponsors might prove to be the only way of keeping the programmes viable. The programmes are produced by Safritel, the SABC’s in-house production unit, apparently in co-operation with the sponsors. Safritel representatives were not available for comment.
Elsewhere in the world, stringent restrictions ensure that sponsors do not have a say over programme content. That stalwart of media independence, the British Broadcasting Corporation, has regulations banning programmes that are “funded by a third party, in exchange for a credit or announcement mentioning the sponsor, their goods or services”.
Britain’s Independent Television Commission lays down similar regulations for independent broadcasters, and the position elsewhere in Europe is much the same. In countries where regulations exist, they are generally based on the principle that any advertising material must be confined to a space which is clearly recognisable as an advertisement.
In South African newspapers, advertorial — material that looks like news, but which is placed by advertisers — is normally marked as such. A newspaper which ran advertorial under the guise of objective reporting would be liable to be censured by the Press Council of South Africa, which lays down restrictions regarding the objectivity of reporting, as well as by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which insists that newspaper advertorial must be clearly
But, when it comes to broadcasting, there are no clear guidelines on advertorial. ASA media director John Koch said the ASA has never handled a case involving advertorial in the electronic media, and there is no certainty over how advertorial on the air should be identified. Renee Conradie of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission (BCC) — the electronic media equivalent of the Press Council — said she thought product promotion ought to be regulated, but that the BCC guidelines do not presently cover this area.
The Independent Broadcasting Authority is known to be concerned about product promotions in sponsored programmes. The results of the IBA’s Triple Inquiry into the SABC’s role as public broadcaster are to be released later this month, and IBA sources have hinted that the report might address the issue of sponsorship.
One of the major concerns of the Triple Inquiry is the question of funding for the SABC as the national public service broadcaster. If the IBA does not tackle the issue of product promotions head-on, indications are that the issue could be sidelined by a cash-strapped
“We’re in a grey area regarding ethics,” one senior SABC source said. “We must first find the answer to the corporation’s funding — and once we have that we can establish ethics.”