By Stef Terblanche
The African National Congress
(ANC) has published its Mangaung national conference resolutions on its website
– including one that reopened the issue of transforming and regulating the
media. Within hours it triggered much reaction. Some say the ANC is just paying
lip service to its media resolution and its proposed parliamentary
investigation of the media will come to nothing. But there appears to be much
more to this complex issue fraught with pitfalls than meets the eye, with
neither the ANC nor the media being as innocent or well-intentioned as they
claim.
The battle over the role,
control, and freedom of the media, or the battle of ideas as the ANC calls it,
has been long in the making. The ANC government is also by far not the first in
South Africa to clash with a media it perceives to be hostile.
But the current battle started
in 2007 when the ANC’s national conference in Polokwane raised the possible
establishment of a media appeals tribunal (MAT) that could "strengthen,
complement and support" existing self-regulatory institutions and measures.
The issue triggered fierce debate and
the media and various analysts attacked the proposal as an attempt to curb
press freedom. At the time the ANC government was being increasingly
embarrassed by media exposés of corruption in its ranks, while unsavoury media
coverage of the affairs of the man who would soon become president, Jacob Zuma,
was also on the rise. At the time Zuma was still facing corruption charges.
The battle intensified in the
months that followed and the debate widened to include the ANC’s charge that
monopolistic ownership of the media continued to vest largely in white hands. In
fact, the ANC says black media ownership in South Africa stands at a paltry
14%.
At the same time the
suspicions of those opposing possible state or political control of the media
were heightened when the ANC reintroduced the highly controversial Protection
of State Information Bill in 2010. Critics of the bill and a diverse range of
organisations and campaigns that mobilised against it argued that it would
stifle media freedom to expose corruption or other illegal activities within
organs of state among other things.
The media itself is to blame
for much of the pressure on it for transformation and regulation. Twice the
media tried to act pre-emptively, and twice it failed to follow through on its
own efforts.
First, responding to the ANC’s
demand for a MAT, the Print Media SA (PMSA) and the SA National Editors Forum
(Sanef) set up the Press Freedom Commission (PFC) in 2011 to find ways of
improving self-regulation and avoid the imposition of a state-controlled MAT.
The commission of nine persons
from outside the media community chaired by former Chief Justice Pius Langa
delivered a report last year on how self-regulation could be improved. The ANC
participated in the PFC’s hearings and later said it was quite satisfied with
its recommendations.
But then the media was caught
napping. The media itself was slow to implement the PFC’s recommendations,
showing a preference for some, rejecting others, or appearing to merely be
going through the motions on some. The Press Council, for instance, said it had
revamped itself, but to outsiders it would appear as little more than window
dressing.
Perceiving implementation by
the mainstream media of its own recommendations to be slow, the ANC revived the
idea of having parliament look at introducing a MAT. At its 53rd national conference in
Mangaung in December the ANC adopted its resolution called “Communications and
the Battle of Ideas”.
This latest ANC resolution
broadened the scope of possible state interference in the affairs of the media
considerably. It now called for the following:
•
The adoption of a media charter to regulate and
transform the media and promote black economic empowerment in the sector;
•
That parliament conduct an inquiry on the
desirability and feasibility of a MAT, which includes the PFC recommendations,
a review of existing media accountability mechanisms, reviewing the balance
between individual rights and those of
the media, and a review of laws dealing with privacy, libel and defamations.
(In the past the ANC complained bitterly that the media was trespassing badly
in this area with reports on the affairs of President Zuma, for instance);
•
Strengthening the Media Development and
Diversity Agency (MDDA) to support more community and commercial entities;
•
Calling on the Competition Commission (CC) to
focus on anti-competitive practices within the sector; and
•
Transforming the advertising industry to ensure
its contribution to media diversity must be prioritized.
The ANC’s current focus is
primarily on all facets of the mainstream print media including its printing
and distribution operations, but also to a lesser degree on the advertising
industry and on the “new media” (online and mobile platform media). Till now
the print media has been self-regulated by its own Press Council; the
advertising industry by its own Advertising Standards Authority (ASA); and the
new media to some extent by the Online Publishing Association (OPA). The major
online newspapers, however, are also owned by the big four print media groups.
The electronic and broadcast
media are already regulated by a statutory body, the Independent Communications
Authority of SA (Icasa). The ANC and independent researchers view this sector
as being the most transformed one.
The MDDA is a development
agency for promoting media development and diversity, a partnership between the
South African Government and major print and broadcasting media companies to assist
in (amongst others) developing community and small commercial media, in terms
of the MDDA Act of 2002. In this sector too there has been large-scale
transformation to black ownership and control.
When the ANC late last year
stepped up its call for transformation of the print media, the owners of the
major media publishing houses organised as the Print and Digital Media of SA
(PDMSA) again tried to stave off government action. They opted for self-transformation
by establishing the Print and Digital Media Transformation Task Team (PDMTTT).
This attempt however also does
not seem set for success. The PDMSA already stated its opposition to a media
charter, which sets it on a collision course with the ANC. And it has displayed
little enthusiasm for the work of its own transformation task team.
Only a few hearings have been
held, while one of the major members of the PDMSA, the Caxton group, recently
withdrew from the process because of the Competition Commission’s investigation
into monopolistic practices in the media. And the media houses have not called
for public participation, nor have they communicated in any depth in their own
newspapers the issues involved or the processes they have embarked on.
The
ANC believes the big four print media groups, namely Naspers, Avusa, Caxton and
the foreign owned Independent Group, still dominate the entire value chain of
the market in this sector including printing, distribution and advertising.
This it views as the biggest barrier to market entry for other media players and
the ANC says it shows possible anti-competitive behaviour. Hence the call for
the Competition Commission to investigate.
The
commission is already investigating suspected anti-competitive behaviour by
Caxton, Naspers, Times Media Group and Independent Newspapers. That there are
problems in this area is quite clear from the commission’s 2011-12 annual
report, which gives the example of a case of “predatory pricing” by Media24 (Naspers).
The commission found that Media24 had used
its two Free State goldfields titles, Vista and Forum, to squeeze out an independent
newspaper called Gold-Net News by charging businesses below-cost advertising
rates, thus “making it impossible for Gold-Net to compete for the business of
advertisers, and eventually forcing it to exit the market in April 2009.”
The ANC on the other hand has
also not come quite clean with a credible explanation for its quest to control
and transform the media.
It does not have what it would
consider being significant influence with the main print media players in South
Africa, being Media24, Caxton, Avusa and Independent Newspapers. A new
ANC-friendly newspaper, The New Age,
was launched by the Gupta family which is close to President Zuma and other
senior ANC members. However, despite recent reports of vast sums of public
funds being channelled to The New Age,
the paper has not made a sufficient enough dent on the circulation front for it
to divulge its actual circulation and readership figures.
The MDDA in 2009 released a
report based on research it had commissioned on the trends of ownership and
control of the South African media. It is this report which the ANC rather
selectively quotes when it puts ownership of the media by blacks, or
“historically disadvantaged individuals”, at 14%.
To arrive at accurate figures
of ownership depends on what categories of media are included and how it is
calculated, bearing in mind also that some of the figures may have changed
since the 2009 release of the study. Ownership data also differ immensely from
one media group to another. For instance, Media24 has 15 HDI shareholding,
Caxton 0% and Avusa 25.5%. Independent
is wholly foreign-owned as therefore also has 0% HDI shareholding.
Together the HDI shareholding
of the big four groups amounts to an average of 10.1%. Without Independent
Newspapers it is 13.4%. Should Primedia be added as the fifth major print media
player with its 50% HDI shareholding, the average for the five groups is 18.1%
HDI ownership.
On the other hand, if the
so-called independent media players – smaller regional and community
publications or single-newspaper publishers – are included, there are at least
206 out of the estimated 469 newspaper titles published countrywide, who have
HDI shareholding, pushing the average total up to around 44%. There are also close to 70 smaller newspapers
that are 100% owned by HDI shareholders.
Another anomaly is the fact that
HDI shareholding is not always considered to be the same as black shareholding.
For instance, The Mail and Guardian
has 87.5% black ownership, but 0% HDI ownership because the black owner of the
newspaper is a naturalised South African originally from Zimbabwe who is not
considered to be an HDI owner.
The bottom line is that any
breakdown of the numbers involved in the transformation of media ownership in
South Africa along the above lines is open to manipulation to suit a particular
viewpoint. It is clear that the ANC’s primary interest is in the big four print
media groups who control the influential major newspapers in South Africa, and
not in the other largely transformed sectors. It is here where the ANC
believes, in its own words, that the “war of ideas must be fought like a real
war”.
The government also already
controls a massive state media sector by virtue of the SABC and the Government
Communication and Information System (GCIS). Through these and through friendly
smaller newspapers as well as the ANC’s own internal communications and
political structures the party quite adequately gets its message across to the
voting masses.
But with literacy rising,
urbanisation increasing and a new generation of better educated voters
emerging, the ANC may perceive a real need to change the control and news
content of the “anti-ANC” mainstream print media.
This is evident too from the
ideological tone of its Mangaung resolution. Apart from the war talk already
mentioned, the ANC says things like –
-
“the battle of ideas is being waged between the
theoretical and practical underpinnings of the democratic developmental state
and neo liberal paradigm”;
-
“his ideological battle is being waged mainly
through the market forces which seek to dislodge the democratic forces as the
drivers of change and to substitute the objectives of the national democratic
revolution (NDR) with a neo-liberal market driven paradigm”;
-
a national dialogue is needed to “reignite and
deepen the battle of ideas” to, amongst others, “reassert the position of the
ANC as a progressive leader of society”; and
-
that, with reference to the four main media
groups, “the print media existed for many years as one of the pillars of the
apartheid” and is still trapped in the patterns and behaviour of the apartheid
era.
Following the ANC’s
publication of its conference resolutions recently, the press ombudsman, Joe
Thloloe, reportedly said he thought it was unlikely that the ANC’s proposed MAT
would materialise as it would be subjected to a Constitutional Court battle,
but that the parliamentary inquiry would continue because the ANC has to be seen
carrying out its resolutions.
However, it is much more than
just the proposed MAT that is at stake this time round. Judging by the vested
interests and strong signs of hidden agendas of both sides to this contest, it
seems a major “war of ideas” may well lie ahead.
