The problem with the South African Broadcasting Corporation is not that biases its broadcasts, but that it holds back too much.
While politically driven players bicker over control of the corporation, SABC journalists should be using this period to assert themselves as independent and pro-active professionals.
Parliament this week held hearings into a change of law that would see the corporation’s board fired. In fact, what South Africa really needs is for the public broadcaster to take more charge of its own affairs.
This is a much-overshadowed issue within the current contestations where pro-Zuma people are seeking to oust those whom they see as responsible for pro-Mbeki coverage.
All eyes have been focused on the wrangle between the parliamentary committee on communications, which has passed a vote of no confidence in the SABC board, and President Thabo Mbeki, who refuses to budge in terms of dismissing the board members.
Unhappy MPs are partly driven by support for Jacob Zuma and the belief that their “chief” has received short shrift from the public broadcaster and its board.
Their camp complains about TV broadcasts of the African National Congress’s Polokwane conference, saying that the coverage ignored a rally in support of Zuma, and instead focused on delegates visibly supporting Mbeki.
Also cited by those who see the corporation as biased are the delays in broadcasting a documentary critical of Mbeki, and the cancellation of an interview with Zuma.
Prior to all this, many people also accused the SABC of suppressing coverage of Zuma supporters protesting at a Women’s Day rally addressed by Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, soon after she replaced their leader as Deputy President when he was fired by Mbeki.
But as regards that particular incident, it was a classic case of cock-up rather than conscious conspiracy. An SABC commission of inquiry with which I was involved found that the TV omission (the incident was, in fact, covered on radio) was down to poor organisation rather than any partisan shenanigans.
Overall, the SABC is probably less biased than the Zuma-ites, and many others, may think.
In fact, according to credible research by the Media Monitoring Project (MMP) published late last year, “there is no clear and systematic political bias by the SABC news”.
The study appears in a book titled Meeting Their Mandates?, published by the Open Society Foundation for South Africa, and it examines SABC3 and seven SABC radio stations.
Corroborating its view, says the MMP, is the fact that very few complaints of political bias at the SABC are actually lodged at the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa, the industry’s self-regulatory body.
The NGO acknowledges that the SABC’s reporting on the status quo “in a manner least likely to cause confrontation and concern” does benefit the government. But, it argues, this is still “distinct from a clear political strategy to favour government”.
However, while exonerating the SABC of deliberate manipulation, the MMP’s work also shows up other ways in which the broadcaster’s news can be problematic — at least as it was in August and September 2006 when the research was done.
For a start, there was almost always only a single source cited per story — resulting, says the MMP, in limited diversity, balance and counter-opinion within each item.
The same problem affected all stories equally. By implication, if government sources were seldom balanced with critics within a given story, the same held for stories based on non-government sources.
Significantly, these other sources predominated in the bulletins.
For instance, a total of 22% of sources on SABC3 were from the government, while the figure ranged from 30% for Umhlobo Wenene radio station to 21% for SAfm. In contrast, the research found, civil society sources amounted to 38% of the total on SABC3, 19% for Umhlobo Wenene, and 31% for SAfm.
Another relevant MMP finding was that the SABC news it studied lacked context and failed to unpack all sides of an argument.
Implicit in all this are the reasons for perceptions of SABC bias. But the MMP’s important nuance is that it is false to reduce the broadcaster to having been an active servant of the erstwhile hegemonic camp in the ANC.
The lesson of all this is that a new-generation SABC faces two challenges. One is to avoid becoming a servant of the Zuma forces; the other is to go beyond what the MMP calls a “conformist” approach to journalism.
As the SABC’s own code of practice states, the broadcaster has “a duty to evaluate, analyse and critically appraise government policies and programmes”.
If the broadcaster took this to heart, in regard to all sectors (government plus all other actors), and if it increased its sources per story, it would go a long way to demonstrating independence.
For this to happen, SABC news needs to raise itself from the rut of reporting in a safe and status quo manner. It needs to take greater charge of its journalism. That would be in the interests of everyone — Zuma-ites, Mbeki-ites … and the rest of us.