The Media Monitoring Project (MMP) said on Monday it was generally disappointed with the South African media’s coverage of the general election, and that smaller political parties got too little airtime.
Each time a party was mentioned in the media, it was entered into the NGO’s database.
In percentage terms, the African National Congress and the government scored 38% across all media, including television, radio and print. The Democratic Alliance came second at 17% and the Inkatha Freedom Party was next with 12%. The figures for the ANC for the election in 1999 was 45% of all coverage.
MMP director William Bird told the Mail & Guardian Online there was generally very little coverage afforded to smaller parties. He said the ANC and government coverage was surprisingly low at 38%, while coverage of Patricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats was relatively high at 7%.
“The ID is an interesting thing. They’ve never run in an election period and they rated pretty damn high — largely because of Patricia de Lille. She’s a good newsmaker and people seemed to be struggling to find news.”
Bird said that one would have suspected that the ANC, being so dominant, would have had higher coverage.
He said there was little evidence of the media having its own election agenda and that most coverage had focused on party campaigns.
“Very few of them managed to implement different story structures, or different angles in their reporting. It showed a lack of imagination. That’s fine, telling people that they were campaigns, but we weren’t getting much information out of it. The media didn’t find alternative angles in order to generate other stories. They were driven by the political parties.”
Figures released by the NGO showed that in the print media category, the Mail & Guardian‘s coverage of the ANC and the government stood at 28% (with the remaining 72% divided between other parties), with Beeld at 31% and Die Burger at 34%. The newspaper with the most coverage of the ANC and the government was the Sunday Sun at 71%, followed by the Sunday Times at 57%.