Don’t read too much into race and readership

Two South African daily papers, and one weekly, still have a majority of white readers, ten years after apartheid was abolished. Four other papers have higher ratios of white readers in 2004 than was the case in 1994. This can be gleaned from the latest All Media Products Survey (Amps).

Surprising? Scary? Evidence, yet again, of the reluctant pace of racial transformation?

Not quite. Because there are reasons in addition to race that help explain the white predominance — these include language, community and class. And there is also evidence overall of an increase in the proportions of black readers.

Two of the publications registering white readers as a majority are Afrikaans-language media — Beeld, with 93% of its readers white, and Rapport which rings in at 63%.

The two publications lag woefully behind their sister paper, Die Burger, where today only 42% of the readers are white. But in their ”defence”, their circulation — unlike Die Burger — is not primarily in a region with a majority population of Afrikaans-speakers who are classified coloured.

The reality is that Beeld and Rapport are probably never going to lose their majority white reader ratios — which are also not simply about white people, but specifically about Afrikaans-speaking whites. The case is analogous to Sowetan, City Press and the Sun — papers that are, and will continue to be, almost exclusively ”black reads”. Likewise too, The Post newspaper in KwaZulu-Natal will remain rooted in the Indian community around Durban.

In short, these overlays of community/language showing up in readership colour as a partial index of the mix, are functions of enduring social diversity. And so it would be cavalier to see these papers simply as awkward and undesirable relics from a racist past. Instead, they can be seen as exhibiting an ethnic character rather than an apartheid one. The point remains that not all whites read Beeld and Rapport, and not all blacks consume the ”black-oriented” press. Reader identities can’t only be reduced to race, even if this social factor is far from being irrelevant.

The third newspaper which Amps shows as having a majority of white readers wraps a different kind of fish. It is Business Day. Unsurprisingly its demographics reflect the continued dominance of whites in the economy, although times are changing fast for this publication.

In 1994, a massive 85% of this newspaper’s readers were white. This has now been reduced to just 51%. In another year, Business Day will probably cross the symbolic threshold, even if its white component remains disproportionate to the demographic makeup of South Africa. As a niche medium, the paper’s readership transformation hinges on the continuing deracialisation of business, which in turn is a function of the normalisation of the economy and the pace of black economic empowerment.

Yet if Business Day is headed in same direction as a society that is moving away from the race divide of old, five important papers seem to be not.

Rapport, for instance, has strongly shown the opposite trend. While six in 10 of its current readers are white, the figure was four in 10 in 1994. Over the period, Rapport‘s coloured constituency fell from being 56% to 33% of its total readership.

This development reveals that the ethnicity of Rapport‘s consumers does not run along the lines of language or race alone — but is probably coterminous with a consolidating, and potentially exclusivist, white Afrikanerdom defined by a confluence of race and language.

The pattern with Rapport is mirrored — albeit in a much lesser way — on the Sunday Times, the Mercury and the Citizen, where white readership in 2004 was between three and six percentage points higher than 10 years before.

But the most radical retrogression between 1994 and 2004 has been the Witness, shifting from 33% white readers to 42% between the two dates.

On the positive side, papers like Die Burger, Port Elizabeth’s Herald and especially the Pretoria News have come a huge distance from the old days of appealing overwhelmingly to whites.

White readers are now a minority on all these papers — most noticeably falling from 70% in 1994 in the case of the Pretoria News to a current 49%. In the case of the Herald, the figure has dropped from 53% to 36% of its readers.

Aiding the Herald has been the closure of what used to be the ”black read” in its catchment city, namely the Evening Post. There was no inevitability, however, that black readers would actually make the shift to what many see as a white-oriented newspaper. (Even in 2003, the Herald recorded the race of rapists or muggers when they were black, despite the fact that doing so in a city with a majority black population served no identificatory purpose and only fuelled racist stereotypes).

The other side of the coin of those papers where white readership is shrinking has been the rise in black reader ratios. Pretoria News has seen Africans grow from 25% in 1994 to 40% today. Business Day experienced a similar growth, with the figures shifting from 8% to 35%.

Overall, comparing 1994 and 2004, the African readership proportion of daily papers in South Africa has increased on average from 47% to 61%, while whites have declined from 33% to 23%.

Publications whose racial ratios show little change between the start and the end of the democracy decade include the Cape Argus, Cape Times and Daily News — although they have seen some fluctuations during the intervening years.

In sum, the racial readership figures reveal interesting patterns ten years after the successful struggle against racism.