Criterios de segmentación:

It is because of some of the aforementioned historical factors that newspapers in South Africa have not been the main source of news for marginalised people, especially the African working-class majority. Jacobs (2004) points out that in the first decade of democracy, both radio and television underwent significant changes, emerging as the only mass media in South Africa. “Ninety percent of South Africans get their news from radio, sixty percent from TV and even less for print” (Davidson, 2002 cited in Jacobs, 2004: 132). To date, this scenario has not drastically changed and, according to Glenda Daniels (2013:7), “Radio remains the country’s most widespread and popular medium in the broadcast landscape, and includes public radio (18 SABC stations) as well as a number of commercial stations such as 702 Talk Radio, Cape Talk 567, Kaya FM, East Coast Radio and 94.7 Highveld Stereo”. According to the February 2013 Radio Audience Measurement Survey (RAMS), “the total adult radio listening population was 31.26-million, and of that, 8.74-million respondents listened to community radio”. Equally, the television landscape continues to be dominated by the SABC but significant inroads have been made by subscription television over the past ten years.

The number of households which have pay-TV has grown from 13% five years ago to 25% in 2012. The fight for audience has also heated up over English news, with free-to-air channel e.tv stealing viewers from the SABC 3’s English news at 7pm. For instance, e.tv’s 7pm news slot gets 2.5-million viewers compared with SABC 3’s news (also 7pm) that gets between 900 000 and a million viewers, according the South African Advertising Research Foundation (Saarf) (Daniels, 2013: 8).

This background is crucial if we are to comprehend the nationalisation discourse in the corporate media. Furthermore, it appears that even within this changing landscape, the

broadcast media is permeated by structural factors such as privatisation that most likely impact the news agenda setting.

The public broadcaster model, in particular, has over the years sought to encourage privatisation by decreasing government subsidies. This has had major implication for news and current affairs programmes, with programmes such as the main news bulletin sponsored by commercial firms (Jacobs, 2004). This model, which includes “public commercial” stations that have to compete for advertising revenue with commercial stations, ordinarily neglect the working class as they attract a large upmarket audience. This was also the case on the television side when the first free-to-air commercial channel, e.tv, was launched in 1999. “These changes have oriented all broadcasting (SABC public broadcasting as much as commercial broadcasting) on the needs and tastes of the wealthier sections of the audience, who are overwhelmingly white” (Sparks, 2009: 207). Indeed, and as Sparks (2009: 207) posits, programming that largely depends on advertising has to, out of necessity, attract the higher income groups and therefore must be disproportionately directed to this group, thus “undoing much of the effort at inclusivity that had inspired broadcasting in the immediate post-transition phase”. Even in the sphere of the broadcast media, structural elements are likely to influence the nationalisation discourse, because of this media platform’s on-going structural links and close proximity to market forces. This on-going transformation of the broadcast media, which has reduced government subsidies while increasing privatisation, makes it vulnerable to capture and co-option by the capitalist market system.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the press in South Africa is much freer now than was the case under apartheid, and thus is more able to bring issues of public importance to the attention of the authorities. This is done through increased capacity of investigative journalism which has uncovered many stories about public and, to a lesser extent, private malfeasance (Duncan, 2014: 3). Nevertheless, it is imperative that we appreciate freedom as a fundamental principle in the analysis of the media in general. In fledgling democratic societies such as South Africa,

“free media” is seen as a key feature through which democracy is sustained and entrenched (Freedman, 2008). Of course, the concept of a free media is a problematic one, as it is argued in this research study that the media is firmly located within the market forces and thus cannot be free from the biases and the whims of the capitalist economic system. It is not surprising, therefore, that, in the view of supporters of media freedom, “the state is conceptualised as the main danger and the state power viewed as potentially the main barrier to the unrestricted

circulation of ideas” (Freedman, 2008: 55). On the contrary, it can be argued that it is the capitalist media monopoly that has become a systemic barrier to the circulation of ideas for the working class and broader society.

The democratic dispensation has led to some transition of the South African media landscape.

However, just like in the apartheid era where it was dominated by four groups listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) – Nasionale Pers, Perskor, Times Media Ltd, and the Independent Group (formerly the Argus) – the corporate press is currently dominated by four major groups – Independent News and Media SA, the Times Media Group, Caxton-CTP and Naspers’ Media 24 (Rumney, 2015). In 2013, the Independent News and Media SA (INMSA) group was purchased by South African media firm Sekunjalo. Indeed, 20 years into democracy, the media monopoly in South Africa continues relentlessly. As Chiumbu (2016: 16) states, it is

“dominated by four print media oligopolies, one dominant public broadcaster [the SABC], one commercial free-to-air television and two satellite television firms”.¹⁸ Generally, this media has not given voice to other social forces outside the dominant views of the market. The Western values imbued in the liberal-pluralist media approaches, entrenched in South Africa, together with the continuation of the apartheid legacy, are some of the factors that perpetuate the asymmetry of information in the country (Chiumbu, 2016). The broadcast landscape is still dominated by the South African Broadcasting Corporation even though there are obvious changes since the dawn of democracy. This has led to the emergence of a free-to-air channel and numerous non-commercial community TV channels (Rumney, 2015).

Another visible sign of the change is the mushrooming of satellite dishes throughout South Africa in rich and poor suburbs alike. Naspers-owned DSTV has provided real competition to the free-to air TV services, and enlarged the choice of channels massively, while proving to be a virtual monopoly in pay-TV (Rumney, 2015: 67).

Indeed, and just like the rest of the societal transition, the South African media landscape has also undergone its own transition.

This industry has experienced both unbundling and privatisation, with ownership restructuring through the entry of international capital and emergent black empowerment groups (Barnett,

18eTV/eNCA is the only commercial free-to-air television station in South Africa. In addition, the country has two satellite TV companies – MultiChoice and TopTV. The latter was launched in 2010 (www.mediaclubsouthafrica.com).

1999). But most fundamentally, the post-apartheid media landscape is characterised by a legal environment in which the Constitution has given rise to freedom of expression, freedom of information and access to information (Berger, 1999). However, with all the changes, the South African print media still has to contend with the accusation of being an untransformed industry.

As reflected in the previous chapter,

The ANC has also repeatedly criticised the print media for a lack of transformation, and have argued that the broadcast media are much more diverse and representative of the demographics of the country than the print media, owing to the fact that the former is state regulated (Duncan, 2011: 2).

Indeed, the corporate media landscape in the post-apartheid epoch has been characterised by significant changes in areas such as legal environment and ownership. Yet this transformation has been perceived as slow. At the same time, the media’s role in the democratic dispensation is contested, thus leading to tension primarily between itself and social actors. It is apparent that apartheid’s market ideology has persisted beyond the post-apartheid dispensation to impact various important institutions such as the corporate media. The corporate media in South Africa, due to structural factors such as its location within market forces, funding model and continuation of the apartheid legacy, reproduces and reinforces neo-liberal ideology which privileges capitalism and marginalises alternative and counter-hegemonic voices (Chiumbu, 2016). Indeed, the South African corporate media operates fully within the framework of commercial logic which inevitably favours elite discourse (Chiumbu, 2016).