Business and commentators are condemning the government’s plan to suspend licensing for subscription TV till year end. But there’s belated logic in the controversial move.
Yes, the decision does delay competition to MultiChoice and M-Net. It also postpones anticipated profits amongst those — like the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and Telkom — who hoped to get a pay-TV licence.
But these concerns should anyway be subject to the bigger issues in the mega-shift from analogue to digital broadcasting over the next three years.
This technical migration requires finding the most rational way to convert existing broadcast licences — and to re-accommodate other licencees who currently use airwaves best suited for digital transmission.
Re-arranging frequency entitlements for digital use has to take account of the interests of radio, TV, wireless internet, telephony, emergency services and security.
These enormously complex matters can’t be pre-empted by licensing new paid TV operators — whose services, anyway, will benefit only the elite for a long time to come. So, if we all have to wait a year, let that be.
Imagine a time, say in 2008, when there’s no suitable spectrum left over for new services, whether wireless internet or high-definition television, because a given company this year got a pay-TV licence that’s ”grandfathered” into the future.
Of course, not all licence applicants were going to use land-based frequencies for their subscription services. But it would have been unfair to give licences to cable or satellite operators and only put the digital terrestrial applicants on hold.
So, the government’s position on delaying the deal has merit. The problem in the first place is in the timing.
The Department of Communications should never have given the regulator the go-ahead for licensing pay TV until all the over-arching digital migration matters had been worked out.
However, the whole issue pales in the face of potentially larger problems elsewhere in the political authority patch. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) last week released a policy discussion document on media.
The lame thinking in this product is a real let-down — and that’s not only because of a blind spot on digital migration. The biggest problem is the continued presence of a perspective whereby the media is still seen as a tool to be manipulated.
This is evident in the document’s posing of the following question: ”What role should the media play in the deepening of democracy and the advancement of fundamental social transformation?”
The engineering implicit in this wording was recently pre-figured in a speech by Minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad. He argued there that freedom of the press did not mean a right to disinform — and, significantly, he left unstated who he thinks should make the media accountable for being irresponsible.
In similar vein, with the media supposed to ”play a role” àla the ANC document, there is also a symptomatic silence as to who is to arrange such behaviour.
The answer about where the agency for intervention lies is buried within another question posed by the document: ”What does the democratic movement need to do to ensure that within a free and diverse media the progressive political and ideological perspectives supported by the majority of South Africans achieve prominence?”
Little wonder that, in the face of contemporary control-oriented views like this, media people will continue to cherish their very unaccountability. Most believe they already constitute a marketplace of ideas, i.e. the very essence of democracy — and that nobody is forced to consume particular media products, especially when there are alternatives to choose from.
They should be deeply concerned that the governing political party is focusing on putting an end to media ”disinformation” and seeking to harness the media for Pretoria’s version of the democratic project.
It wouldn’t be quite so bad if the ANC were simultaneously proposing ideas to encourage more outlets and a more diversified media. But the document is wholly inadequate in this respect:
- It refers to R7-million given by the government to the Media Development and Diversity Agency in 2005/6, without as much as a hint as to how embarrassingly pathetic is this gesture.
- It is even weaker when it comes to the SABC. There is no reference to the controversy around blacklisting. And nothing on previous ANC policy about public funding for the SABC — a policy that has been mainly been ignored by the ANC government to date.
- Completely absent are any new proposals — whether carrots or sticks — to expand and diversify print-media ownership.
- Despite praising the prospects of cellphones as mass media, there is not a peep about the place of government policy in cutting the costs of telecoms and internet.
Another lacuna is the silence about the ongoing dispute over the government’s effort to bring news media into pre-publication censorship through changing the Film and Publications Act.
What the ANC document does do is to stick the knife into journalists by reminding readers of the ”generally corrupt relationship” phrase that was incorrectly recycled across the media.
On the other hand, there is no recognition whatsoever of the invaluable service rendered by investigative journalism in recent years. Instead, the document claims that phrases like ”funding scandal” and ”controversial minister” are used ”without a moment’s thought about their veracity or the value judgements that may inform them”.
In other words, for the ruling party, it is not reality that needs changing, but rather the way the media describes Oilgate and Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. This is supposed to be a serious policy discussion document.
A political movement that brought South Africa democracy should be thinking beyond control ideas past sell-by date and sterility as regards media development. No such luck.
Instead of producing a sense of promise, the document delivers only disappointment and a degree of apprehension. If this gets adopted as official ANC policy, it will put the problems in licensing pay TV in the shade.