Media, Geopolitics, and Power

A View from the Global South

Herman Wasserman

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780252083266
  9780252041624
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252050282
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The end of apartheid brought South Africa into the global media environment. Outside companies invested in the nation's newspapers while South African conglomerates pursued lucrative tech ventures and communication markets around the world. Many observers viewed the rapid development of South African media as a roadmap from authoritarianism to global modernity.

Herman Wasserman analyzes the debates surrounding South Africa's new media presence against the backdrop of rapidly changing geopolitics. His exploration reveals how South African disputes regarding access to, and representation in, the media reflect the domination and inequality in the global communication sphere. Optimists see post-apartheid media as providing a vital space that encourages exchanges of opinion in a young democracy. Critics argue the public sphere mirrors South Africa's past divisions and privileges the viewpoints of the elite. Wasserman delves into the ways these simplistic narratives obscure the country's internal tensions, conflicts, and paradoxes even as he charts the diverse nature of South African entry into the global arena.

PART I

Transitions

CHAPTER 1

From Apartheid to a New Democracy

Areas of Shift

It might be tempting to cast the development of the South African media post 1994 in a teleological narrative that moves between two binary points—from repression under an authoritarian government to constitutionally guaranteed freedom, from isolation during the apartheid years to the globalization of media capital and content.

However, for several reasons, the picture is not quite as simple. In the first place, the shift from apartheid to democracy does not coincide with a clear move from isolation to globalization. International media already covered South Africa during the apartheid years and there had been international involvement in the form of media assistance to antiapartheid, alternative media. Moreover, despite severe restrictions on the local and international media (such as the prohibition on quoting or depicting “banned persons” like Nelson Mandela), and notwithstanding the fact that television was actively kept out of the country until 1976 and international sanctions severely limited South Africans’ exposure to international media, South African publics were not hermetically sealed off from the outside world. Ironically, White South Africans sometimes learned more about race relations from an American television series like The Cosby Show than from their own media, as Krabill has pointed out.1

Second, while the media did operate under a range of oppressive laws during apartheid, the relationship between media, apartheid, and democracy cannot be cast in a simplistic narrative in which heroic journalists fought an unjust system until they won press freedom. Although this narrative is often expediently used to ward off new pressures in the democratic era (as discussed in Chapter 4), it overstates the mainstream media’s resistance to apartheid. Putting aside the independent, alternative press,2 the mainstream media either supported the apartheid regime, at least toed the official line, or provided a very limited critique of certain aspects of apartheid policy. In other words: “the bulk of the media did little to challenge apartheid.”3

Third, democratization’s gains remain incomplete. In terms of its political economy, it can be argued that the media is now even more concentrated than under apartheid, due to the disappearance of most of the alternative media sector and the growth of big commercial media conglomerates.4 This situation is exacerbated by the persisting huge disparities in wealth, living standards, and access to resources that continue to present “daunting barriers” to the emergence of a single or homogenous postapartheid public sphere.5 The contestation about media norms and values, which has already been alluded to in the introduction and which will be discussed in more depth in the following section of this book, has highlighted the differences in opinion about how media should contribute to democratic deepening. What is more, the arrival of democracy has not meant that the media has become completely free from political pressures and renewed threats to its freedom.6

There is, however, no question that in many respects the South African media has undergone major changes since apartheid. Whether these changes have been wide and deep enough to refer to a complete “transformation” of the media industry, or whether it would be more accurate to point to the continuation of certain dimensions and tendencies, is a debate that we will return to shortly. It would, however, be useful to attempt to get an overview of the major areas in which shifts did occur during the transition from apartheid to democracy, even as the simplistic dualities outlined above are avoided.

This chapter will first provide a descriptive overview of the changes in four major areas of media structures and practices, so as to indicate how democratization impacted on these areas, rather than providing a critical assessment of the extent to which these changes can be seen as sufficient or transformative enough. The four main areas that will be looked at are the following: ownership and editorial composition, attempts to diversify the public sphere, normative and regulatory frameworks, and conceptions of the relationship between media and political power. Following this overview, some of the debates about how transitions from authoritarian states to democratic ones should be conceptualized will be explored. Like other postauthoritarian countries in central Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, South Africa can be seen as an example of a “new democracy” in which the media has played an important transitional role. Disagreements, however, remain about how this role should be defined, how central the media is to the transitional process, and whether it contributes to democratic deepening or entrenches continuity with the past. The relation between contemporary journalistic identities and roles and a reflection on the media’s historical role will be considered in more detail in the following chapter as well.

What this overview of the four main areas of change shows is that a liberal-democratic consensus emerged among the media, in which it positioned itself as independent from the government and as supportive of a free-market environment within which the media can operate as businesses. Despite the clashes between the media and government that occurred when the media’s independence was threatened, and the media’s professional ideology of an adversarial stance toward government, the media and the ANC government have actually been in agreement over the latter’s economic policies adopted after 1994. Some have gone so far as to say that an “academic-institutional-media complex” produced a coherent hegemonic discourse in support of the ANC’s neoliberal turn.7 It may be argued that the media’s criticism has been largely directed at instances in which this consensus has not been honored by the ANC, for instance, when corruption undermines the efficiency of “service delivery” (premised on principles of privatization)8. This contradictory relationship between a media that vehemently asserts its independence from a government whose policies it has largely been in agreement with, and a government which focuses its attack on media that serves an elite to which it also appeals, can be seen as having played out across different areas. Let us look at each of these areas of shift in turn.

Ownership and Editorial Composition

The changes in media ownership patterns since the advent of democracy have become a productive area of research for scholars of the South African political economy. The private media was subjected to political pressures right from the start of the transition. The ANC had made clear its assumptions that the press was White-controlled and, even when ownership of sections of the press passed into the hands of Black capital, the print media was still being criticized by then president Nelson Mandela for their criticism of the new government. As Tomaselli observes, Black journalists—now entwined with the logic of capital—foregrounded their professional identities as journalists rather than as Black citizens with ideological loyalties to the ANC.9 The ostensible correlation between economic restructuring and political change in the country was evident, especially in the terrain of the media, partly because of the centrality of this industry to the transition as a whole. As Jacobs points out, debates about the media are often “debates about democracy in disguise.”10

The ownership shifts were perhaps the most evident in the print media sector while, on a regulatory level, shifts also took place within the broadcasting sector. In the 1990s, in anticipation of the forthcoming democratic elections, the print media embarked on a process of restructuring and “unbundling” parts of its capital to sell off in an attempt to demonstrate its commitment to Black Economic Empowerment (BEE).11 The company Argus Holdings Ltd sold off a majority share in the Sowetan, at the time the daily newspaper with the highest circulation in the country, which under apartheid provided some representation to its Black readership in a society from which they had been disenfranchised—even if its position was not as radically opposed to apartheid as the “alternative” press.12 The 52 percent share was sold to a Black Empowerment company called Corporate Africa, headed by Nelson Mandela’s personal physician, Nthato Motlana, and the remaining stake remained under ownership of Argus. Argus in turn was bought—incrementally but by 1995 in totality—by the Irish-based Independent Newspapers owned by Tony O’Reilly. O’Reilly renamed the company—which publishes major English-language newspapers such as The Star, Cape Argus, Daily News, and Pretoria News—Independent Newspapers. In another major restructuring deal, the company that owned the remaining English newspapers, Johannesburg Consolidated Investments (JCI or Johnnic) was unbundled from the mother company JCI. Johnnic had interests in the Central News Agency retail chain, the recording company Gallo, the pay-TV channel M-Net and Times Media Limited (TML, owners of Sunday Times/Business Times). The Black empowerment consortium NEC (National Empowerment Consortium, consisting of small businesses and unions supporting the ANC) bought 20 percent of Johnnic in 1996 for R1,5 billion (approximately $380 million at the 1996 exchange rate), at the time the biggest cash deal in South Africa, with the option to increase its stake to 35 percent within 18 months.13 Through Johnnic’s (today called Avusa)14 companies MultiChoice International and its shareholding in two TML titles, Financial Mail and Business Day, that were bought by the British-based group Pearsons in 1996, local Black capital entered into the global media market. Black Economic Empowerment capital was later further globalized through the share offerings made to Black investors in M-Net and Naspers, which was built on Afrikaner capital and, under apartheid, supported the National Party and (since the 1990s) became a global media behemoth.15 The selling off of the “family silver,” as Naspers managing director Ton Vosloo described it at the time, to Black-owned companies should be seen as part of a broader attempt by the Afrikaans media to reposition itself in relation to the new political and economic environments and to derive optimal benefit from the political transition. The subsequent global success of Naspers as a multinational media behemoth, with interests in the rest of Africa, China, and elsewhere in the world, is testament to the success of this strategy.16

The restructuring of media ownership during the transitional period therefore responded to the domestic demands of aligning the interests of the new political elite and established capital. At the same time, new configurations of the local and the global emerged that had an impact not only on the flows and contraflows of media capital but also on media content and media practices. The acquisition of some of the most important English-language newspaper titles by the Irish Independent group contributed to tensions between the local and the global economies, as the local operation was expected to deliver profits to the Irish mother company. Here was an example of how the global flows and contraflows of media capital also have a direct impact on the cultures and practices of journalism in localities. The Irish conglomerate was accused of “looting” its South African subsidiary to send profits back to Ireland.17 Local operations were “cut to the bone,” replacing experienced journalists with novices and cutting overheads, with the result that the quality of journalism suffered to the extent that the newspapers were seen to have become “sad shadows of themselves.”18 The commercial pressure created by this opening up of the local media industry to global competition may therefore be seen as having “devastating” effects on media practices at the time.19 Some of these results included a “tabloidization” of the print media, especially; a reduction of staff; a “juniorization” of newsrooms;20 a preference for commercial imperatives in making editorial judgments; and an erosion of specialized reporting.21

In addition to the restructuring of ownership to include Black capital, more Black editorial staff were appointed to newsrooms, some of them occupying senior editorial positions at leading mainstream newspapers. Some of these appointments included: Ferial Haffajee (editor of the quality weekly Mail & Guardian before assuming editorship of the Sunday newspaper City Press and later becoming editor-at-large of the South African edition of the Huffington Post), Justice Malala (editor of the now defunct ThisDay), Mathatha Tsedu (editor of Sunday Times and City Press), Jovial Rantao (editor of Sunday Tribune), Makhudu Sefara (The Star), Moegsien Williams (Pretoria News, Argus, Cape Times, The Star), and Karima Brown (executive editor of Independent titles). But in spite of attempts to change the racial makeup of its owners and editorial staff, critics have pointed out that the print media’s class base remains the same22 and that media continues to operate according to the same functionalistic structural logic of circulation, distribution networks, price structure, and advertising that has as its target the lucrative and arguably still largely White, or at least affluent Black, elite market.23 In other words, the question posed by these critics is whether the changes to the racial composition of the boardrooms and the newsrooms did enough to transform the media at the level of the public sphere.24

Diversity of ownership continues to be an issue in the highly concentrated South African media market. More than twenty years after the arrival of democracy, attempts are still being made to transform the press in terms of the racial composition of its ownership. Parliamentary hearings into print media transformation held in 2011 brought to light that although the number of Black editors of newspapers had increased since democracy, this was not reflected in the political economy of ownership and control. In 2011, Black ownership of the press stood at 14 percent and female representation on media boards at only 4.4 percent.25 A task team established to hold public hearings into transformation of the print and digital media lasted only six months until two of the four print media companies withdrew from the process in response to a government inquiry in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Transitions
• Part II: Local Contestations
• Part III: Global Shifts
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index