Prueba de germinación

The Triple Inquiry report of 1995 introduced the three tier system of broadcasting which consisted of community, commercial and public broadcasting. However, the commercial pressures have led to the dominance of one tier system of broadcasting in South Africa, which is commercial. The public broadcaster and other community players are now seeing themselves competing with private broadcasters in search for capital. In so doing, this will inevitably compel the public and community broadcasters to divert from their mandates. In the capitalist economy, the community media and the PSBs are being side-lined in favour of commercial driven media. On the international front, the UK is also synonymous with this issue as the BBC has also been given more freedom to pursue its commercial objectives (Steemers, 1999:44). Steemers (1999:44) also argues that digitisation and convergence have led to a situation by which broadcasters are more interested in commercial transactions than universal access of communication. While this is good for PSBs competitiveness in global markets, this however leads to the confusion in defining the PSB.

Critical political economy theory is very critical about the dominance of commercial players in policy making. In a capitalist environment, the role of the state in communication matters is diminishing due to market pressures. As indicated, the global economy is now governed by neoliberal market policies which call for business domination in all spheres of life (McChesney, 2004: 7). The ICASA regulations processes are dominated by commercial actors with vested financial interest. More than two thirds of the DTT spectrum has been allocated to commercial broadcasting leaving the PSB and community media with less than one third.

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However, the trend toward commercialisation is also increased by the extent to which community and public broadcast media are also increasingly becoming commercial in nature. According to Duncan (2012a);

“Owing to government’s unwillingness to provide significant support for the non- commercial tiers, South Africa’s media landscape has become dominated by commercial television. Public service and community television have been forced to survive by becoming commercialised, leading to all tiers of television targeting upper income brackets and addressing audiences as consumers, to different extents.”

Big commercial consortiums are indirectly investing in this community media that are struggling to sustain themselves in a digitally converged environment. According Thomas and Mavhungu (2013), four out of five community televisions on-air are controlled by private entities such as Urban Brews and Zallywood. The Urban Brew which is the subsidiary of Kagiso Media owns Soweto TV, Bay TV, and One KZN whilst Zallywood controls Tshwane TV. The only community television station which is self-owning is Cape TV but it is struggling (Thomas and Mavhungu, 2013). The situation is also exaggerated by the lack of funding from state and the ineffectiveness of MDDA in supporting the community media sector.

The push towards the neoliberal policies has led to government limiting their funding in the public broadcasters. Due to lack of funding from government, the SABC in search for profits has resolved to compete for capital with private operators in order to be sustainable. The SABC in recent times is becoming more market driven to such an extent that it is difficult to draw a line between public and commercial services. Heavy reliance on advertising and sponsorship revenue has somehow compromised the SABC’s public offering. According to SOS Coalition (2012), the

SABC has failed on some of its role of being the public broadcaster because they

rely heavily on the advertising revenue. Political economy sees the media which heavily rely on advertisement as commercial entities which are there to sell audiences to advertisers, and not to sell ideology to consumers (Garnham 1992). This means that the public service programmes will be side-lined in favour of programmes which will entice advertisers. According to Leurdijk (2006), PSBs are accused of crowding the market by offering similar services to that of commercial broadcasters in order to sell the audience to the advertisers.

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According to the Broadcast Act of 1999, the public service broadcast means a broadcasting service provided by a person who receives his or her revenue either on licence fees or from the state. The act requires the state to play a major role in terms of funding the public broadcaster, but in practice, the funds that come from the state to the SABC are very limited. This could be attributed to the fact that there is a drive toward commercialisation and liberalisation in the broadcasting sector.

The challenge for the SABC is to secure funding for PSB that would be realistic and substantial enough to allow the public broadcaster to fulfil its public mandate in a competitive market (Fourie, 2004). Due to lack of funding, the SABC which is commercially driven has launched a 24 news channel on DSTV which is inaccessible to majority of the population. The SABC has signed a deal worth R550 million with

DSTV to produce content which will be broadcast on DSTV (Gedye, 2013). This

action which is motivated by financial interest will give rise to the public media which does not represent the need of the society which they claim to represent.

Fourie (2010) has proposed the model called distributed PSB as a solution to never- ending crisis of leadership, finances and accountability at the SABC. In this model, Fourie (2010: 3-4) argues that “the mandate and remit of public service broadcasting should not be restricted to a single broadcaster – but broadened to include the expectation that all broadcasters in a country’s broadcasting system have the legal responsibility to dedicate the quota of their programming to topics of national interest.” However, public interest grouping such as SOS Coalition have constantly opposed to the idea of privatising or dismantling the SABC. The SOS Coalition calls for the SABC to be strengthened rather than to be dismantled. The distributed PSB model will also not be ideal given the desire by powerful commercial enterprise to attract advertisers by broadcasting content which will entice the advertisers instead of information diversity.

6.12 Conclusion

The chapter discussed different factors that will enhance or undermine universal access of digital television by using critical theories. Through the application of

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critical theories, the chapter discussed the role of government in implementing digital migration which has been reduced due to influence of globalisation and powerful economic factors which are driven by the neo-liberalism principle. Due to government failures, the ownership of digital migration in South Africa is now at the hands of few economic actors who are currently migrating a large number of people via their own satellite platforms. As a result, the digital migration project is at crossroads due to lack of government capacity in implementing its own policies. In terms of policy making, the policy network theory is very concerned about the tendency to exclude members of the public and interest groups when it comes to policy making processes. The policy making processes which is led by the powerful economic players result in the policies which favours their continued domination through the restriction of competition, targeting of upper class audience, broadcasting of foreign content and the dominance of commercial tier of broadcasting. With this in mind, the universal access of digital television in South Africa remains at crossroads.

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