For all the achievements of the past decade, the struggle for a free media continues, the African National Congress said on Friday.
The country marked Media Freedom Day on October 19 — commemorating the banning in 1977 of The World and Weekend World by the apartheid government — and the challenge is to build a robust, free and diverse media at a time when the market, not the state, is posing the greatest threat to media freedom, the party said on its website, ANC Today.
The Constitution guarantees the right of every South African to freedom of expression, explicitly including freedom of the press and other media.
The dark days of state censorship, bannings, harassment and imprisonment have been emphatically and unequivocally consigned to the past.
”Yet for all the achievements of the past decade, the struggle for a free media continues.
”While it may have been freed from the shackles of apartheid control, the media in South Africa still face an uphill struggle in achieving any real measure of diversity,” the ANC said.
The media’s ability to represent collectively the broad range of views and interests in society is limited by, among other things, the pressure of the market.
While all South Africans have the right to freedom of expression, the capacity of the vast majority to exercise that right through the media is extremely limited.
This problem is most pronounced in the print media, but it also affects broadcast media.
Because the broadcast media consist of a mix of commercial and public stations, the collective impact of the market on this sector is lessened.
By contrast, the print-media sector is almost entirely commercial, posing significant challenges for the principle of freedom of expression, particularly in the context of the economic inequalities present in South African society.
Diversity in media
Though often not acknowledged in public discourse on media freedom, diversity is as much an integral component of a free media as is the absence of state censorship and control.
”It is meaningless to free the media from control by the state only to have it overwhelmingly controlled by some other social force.”
The objective is to ensure the media in collective terms are owned and controlled by the broad range of interests and forces comprising society.
However, a number of factors pose significant challenges to this, such as the concentration of ownership in the print media.
Although a wide range of newspaper and magazine titles is produced, many are owned or controlled by just a few companies.
The three largest media groups together account for more than 90% of the total number of newspapers sold each week.
This concentration of ownership and control is then aggravated by a tendency within many of these groups to share copy between different titles.
”Add to this the reliance by many newspapers on wire services like the South African Press Association, and there is very little, in terms of news content, to tell the country’s main newspapers apart.”
Another factor militating against diversity in the press is its commercial nature.
Driven by a need to gain market share in those sections of society to whom advertisers are more readily drawn, newspapers are under pressure to shape their content to meet a particular commercial goal.
In a country with such great disparities of wealth and income, there is relentless pressure on the commercial media to gain a share of the more affluent section of the market.
Few newspapers seek out a readership among the poor, because there is very little advertising revenue to be had there.
And those newspapers targeting the more affluent sections of society tend to reflect the views and interests of those sections.
”Consequently, across the whole range of newspaper titles, there are very few newspapers that reflect the interests, needs and views of the poor.”
It is clear that many battles lie ahead if the objective of a truly robust, diverse and free media is to be achieved, the ANC said. — Sapa