The Privately Owned Media in South Africa: Villains or Victims in the Struggle for Democracy?
Author(s)
Collinge, Jo-Anne
Abstract
This paper descries the print media in South Africa as being overwhelmingly commercial and profit-oriented. The ‘alternative’ press – or ‘democratic’ as it prefers to be called – accounts for about three per cent of the total number of newspapers sold each week. The mainstream press is exceedingly centralized and dominated by three newspaper groups in which the largest interests are held by the giant corporations of South Africa’s highly centralized economy. With 19 dailies (only five of them in Afrikaans) and a great number of weeklies, it publishes an average of 8.75 million copies per week while the ‘alternative’ or ‘democratic’ publications, characterized by a strong anti-apartheid stance, collectively sold no more than about 170,000 copies a week (1989). The paper examines the contradictions inherent in the development of the privately owned media – primarily the commercial English-language press – in South Africa. Having analyzed the prevailing situation and the prospects for the future, the author comes to the conclusion that it is difficult to say if the commercial media should be labeled victims or villains in the struggle for democracy. The press has always contained within it progressive journalists who have seriously tried to serve the ends of the struggle for democracy – “the public interest” as they construe it. While such journalists have been a minority, it is unlikely that the Mass Democratic Movement could regard the media as a site of struggle without the presence of people who share their vision placed inside these institutions. Of the private media institutions themselves, it must be said that when there is a conflict between the particular interests they represent and the interests of the voteless majority, they have – more often than not – ceased to be the voice of the general public. The author concludes that to redress this situation in a post-apartheid society, it is clear that the print media cannot be left in the hands of monopolistic corporations. There is increasing debate about how the monopolies can be dismantled and the print media reorganized to ensure fundamental access to the media by a wide range of interest groups, access that would extend beyond the consumption of media, into the realms of control.
