newsroom’
Matthew Krouse
Election coverage on television was a long and protracted low-key drama. Jumping to the different polling stations with the SABC, one got a good look at South Africa in its winter garb. Sadly, we must be the worst-dressed nation on earth.
Of course, the coverage wasn’t a fashion show. Rather, it was a repetitious turnstile of fillers played over and over, with appropriate focus on the poor. A 101-year-old woman confessed she had voted for Nelson Mandela, while voting prisoners looked happy to be let out of their cells. Such clips were interspersed with comment by unidentifiable individuals – specifically young academics – most of whom had not been heard of before.
Until the first results emerged at 8pm, touchingly from the 100-odd residents on Robben Island, there was not much going on. Certainly, it was not the cliffhanger one normally associates with such an important day. But, since the nation knew what the outcome of the election would be, how many surprises could there really be?
Another reason the coverage at times seemed lifeless was due to the fact that the SABC news staff were not adequately prepared for such an extensive broadcast of the event.
Speaking from the Independent Electoral Commission nerve centre, from where the broadcast took place, a senior staff member said: “On Tuesday all the people on news were phoned to say that, contrary to initial plans, they wanted six hours of airtime to be filled between noon and 6pm.
“They had a year to prepare yet the day before they told people, not only do they want bulletins on the hour every hour from noon, they also want inserts in between. They want the air to be filled with whatever.”
Given the fact that most of Wednesday’s broadcast was sucked out of someone’s thumb, the SABC team did not fare too badly. Hours of rapport by anchors, some of it confused, was spiced with funny anecdotes: somewhere a superstitious woman had tried to put a spell on a ballot box, and in Kuruman in the Northern Province empty ballot boxes were found in a tavern.
On Thursday, the already despondent SABC crew was given another eight hours of unscheduled airtime to fill this time from 10am to 6pm. According to the senior staff member, things were “going mad”.
Asked about this major glitch in planning, Phil Molefe, the editor-in-chief of TV news, said: “An election is a very important event on the calendar of any country, and for South Africa as a young democracy it is even more important.
“The SABC, as a public broadcaster, decided we must give it a full coverage. We went with a 24-hour coverage which brought the full election activity to all South Africans, faster than any other news organisation would have done.”
When approached on the question of staff frustration, described as virtual mutiny, he had this to say: “If there was mutiny we would not have had a successful election as we’ve had. Mutiny exists in the head of that person who phoned you.
“I know you always create your own phantom TV newsroom, one that exists in the head of your phantom sources,” said Molefe.
On e.tv, it appears the election went a little smoother, with the station’s specially designed graphics – called a virtual set – looking like something out of the sci-fi series Star Trek.
While its broadcast hours were infinitely more moderate than that of the SABC, e.tv’s head of corporate affairs Wandile Zote confessed that the broadcast had cost R5- million.