Time for a rant. The whoring of editorial space that masquerades as motoring journalism is the subject. Although the sentiment will sound naïve in the extreme, maybe what we have here is an opportunity to lend some real world meaning to the collective hand-wringing at media’s recent humiliations.
According to Nielsen Media Research, motor manufacturers were responsible for R440-million of the industry’s total R11,7-billion spend last year. That’s a big whack. It’s a figure that sheds light on why so many media owners are all too happy to have their journalists sucking up to car companies. But it’s when one looks at the exceptions that the rule starts to make less sense.
As Helen Ueckermann reported in this magazine some months back (April 2004 issue), Rapport is one such exception. The paper’s motoring editor Egmont Sippel wrote the truth about a certain sedan’s fuel starvation problem, which prompted the manufacturer to hit back with the cunning and subtle “no-more-advertising-for-you” approach. Rapport editor Tim du Plessis simply told the manufacturer to get stuffed. And the evidence suggests that Sunday Times stands by its right to cover the ugly truth too. Nobody can accuse David Bullard, who’s on the topic again in his column this month, of prostrating himself before the motoring industry’s money men.
Sunday Times and Rapport are the two biggest newspapers in the country. Our feature on weekly newspapers shows that between them these titles account for around 830,000 of the sector’s audited copy sales. To the cynic, the fact that they generate a combined R470-million a year in adspend (AIS/Adex: 2003) probably explains why they can afford to take the moral high ground on certain issues. But maybe the more pertinent observation is that they’re in this position precisely because they don’t kow-tow. Could it be that so many people buy these newspapers because so many people trust these newspapers?
Here’s the naïve part. In the long run, advertisers need the reach of respectable media more than respectable media needs the spend of advertisers. The assumption that the audience aren’t dupes – that they know when they’re being sold down the river – is implicit in Sanef’s view that local media has to salvage its credibility in the eyes of a disillusioned public. So taking on (outing?) “journalists-for-hire” may just be one way to rebuild media’s integrity. The advertisers would have no option but to play nice because, if they’re any good, they’ll eventually want to be where the consumers are.
Ey, but it’s lekker to dream—
PS. – We’d like to draw your attention to Global Effect, where Sean Jacobs takes over from Tim Spira as a suitably acerbic “Global Effect” columnist. Sean has worked as a senior political researcher and analyst at Idasa (1997-2001) and recently completed his PhD in Politics at the University of London, with a dissertation focusing on the relation of democracy, power and mass media in post-apartheid South Africa. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is a fellow of New York University’s International Center for Advanced Studies.