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| ISBN-13: | 9780253004291 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/31/2010 |
| Series: | African Expressive Cultures |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Tabloid Journalism in South Africa
True Story!
By Herman Wasserman
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2010 Herman WassermanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-22211-4
CHAPTER 1
Shock! Horror! Scandal! The Tabloid Controversy and Journalism Studies in Post-Apartheid South Africa
In many regions of the world, the death of newspapers is expected soon. One critic (Meyer 2004) famously predicted that the last newspaper will be read and recycled in April 2040. Amid this panic about the future of printed news, a newspaper revolution has taken place in South Africa.
The newspaper market in that country has been conquered convincingly by the entry of the new tabloid newspapers that have turned the local media landscape upside down and created heated controversy in South African journalism circles (Wasserman 2006b) to such an extent that the tabloid "revolution" has attracted international attention.
The Daily Sun is the country's biggest daily newspaper, with a circulation of around 500,000 copies per day, which translates into around 4.7 million regular readers. Its closest daily rival in terms of circulation (although aimed at a different market) is "quality" newspaper The Star, published in Gauteng province, with around 178,000 copies. The Daily Sun also competes with the weekly Sunday Times in terms of copies sold (the ABC figures for the corresponding period show 504,000 copies per week for the Sunday Times). Importantly, the Daily Sun has almost a million more readers than the Sunday Times (which has 3.8 million according to the AMPS for the corresponding period). This is because the newspaper is shared among more people, creating a community of readers. The publisher, Deon du Plessis, claims that there is even a second-hand market for copies — such is the demand for the paper among those that can barely afford it.
Although the Daily Sun is the most successful tabloid in the country, it is not the only one that has recently entered the South African media landscape. It forms part of a wave of tabloid newspapers that have swept the country since the mid-2000s, challenging the dominant journalistic norms and sparking heated debate in industry and academic circles. But most importantly, these tabloids have created a mass readership out of the poor and working-class Black majority of the country that had hitherto been largely ignored by the post-apartheid mainstream press, which had been concentrating on middle-class and elite readerships.
Why Think about Tabloids?
Why a book on the South African tabloids? In the first, and most general, instance, it is noteworthy that in an era where the existence of newspapers is under threat in many parts of the world, a new print-media genre introduced in a developing country has met with unprecedented commercial success. For scholars of journalism and media, this development underscores the need for scholarship to take a global view, the importance of more comparative research instead of unproblematically extrapolating the circumstances and experiences of media contexts in the developed world. The emergence of the South African tabloids is significant not only as a case study that might contribute to a richer understanding of global journalism, but also for what they say about the mediated public sphere in emerging democracies. The genesis and growth of these tabloids are linked to the changing socio-political context and the shifting media landscape in the country since the demise of formal apartheid in the 1990s. Studying the social, cultural, and political meanings of tabloids within the transitional South African democracy can therefore also indicate to us some of the conditions under which this transition is mediated, and the potential and limitations of the popular press within such a context. The South African tabloids can provide an example of how societal shifts in transitional settings are influenced by (and prey to) local and global market forces; they offer a picture of how popular culture, mediated politics, and discourses of citizenship can converge in a young democracy; and they illustrate how local and global cultural forces interact in shaping media formats and content. Of importance in such a study is not only tabloid content, but also the views and experiences of tabloid producers and tabloid readers.
Tabloids and the Post-Apartheid Media Sphere: Economic Shifts
In particular, this book hopes to contribute to the debates about the multileveled shifts occurring in South African society after the demise of apartheid, especially as these concern journalism and the media. With the arrival of formal democracy in the country in 1994, the public sphere was broadened in major ways — freedom of speech was guaranteed in the Constitution, race was no longer a formal preclusion to participation in public debate and political processes, the media were revitalized as apartheid-era restrictions were lifted and replaced by self-regulation, and the media achieved wider legitimacy as the demography of newsrooms changed to better represent the country's ethnic and racial profile.
But the public sphere also contracted. Under apartheid, there had been a vibrant alternative press which found its raison d'être in the struggle against apartheid. Consequently, alternative opinions to those in the mainstream media were in wide circulation, even while they were suppressed by the apartheid regime's intricate set of impediments on press freedom. In the post-apartheid era, virtually all these alternative voices disappeared, leaving the media landscape to be dominated by commercial media — even as attempts were made to develop the community media sector through the establishment of the Media Diversity and Development Agency (MDDA) and the awarding of community radio broadcasting licenses (we will return to the point about alternative media in the next chapter). Progressive social movements like the Treatment Action Campaign, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and the Anti-Privatisation Forum have, to varying extents and with varying levels of success, used new media technologies to amplify other methods of communication with target audiences (Wasserman 2007). But as far as the printed press is concerned, the post-apartheid era has seen the dominance of a corporatized, professionalized commercial news industry. On one level, the tabloids can be seen as an extension of this move toward market-driven (as opposed to explicitly ideologically motivated) media. They belong to big conglomerates set on extracting as much profit as possible from the communities they cater to — if they manage to contribute to the good of society in the process, this might be seen as a positive spin-off rather than the main aim.
But on another level, the tabloids could be seen as stepping into the gap left by the demise of alternative media (although referring to the South African tabloids as alternative media in and of themselves would certainly be stretching this definition too far). The dominance of commercial media in the post-apartheid era meant that the logic of selling lucrative audiences to advertisers held sway over newspapers, and the working-class and unemployed majority in the country did not count among these readerships. The major newspapers catering to a Black readership, like the Sowetan and City Press, had their sights trained on the middle class and elites. A number of free "knock-and-drop" newspapers had been circulating in Black townships, but these were small operations, mostly vehicles for local advertising. These small publications did not influence the mainstream news agenda, nor did they have a significant impact on debates about the media industry or journalism in the country in the way that the tabloids started doing. This climate made it possible for the tabloids to become ersatz community or alternative papers.
The tabloids seem to have turned the received orthodoxy about newspaper business models around, creating a mass readership among the poor and the working class (the latter also consisted of a young, upwardly mobile group that had the potential to become big spenders). For the first time since the end of apartheid, the poor majority of South Africans had a big print-media outlet that viewed news items from a perspective they recognized as familiar, that addressed them on their terms rather than from above, that articulated their opinions and views, and that dared to challenge dominant journalistic conventions in the process.
The tabloids' brash, defiant attitude did not win them many friends in the journalistic establishment. The journalistic fraternity responded harshly to these new kids on the block and even considered barring tabloid journalists from the professional body for editors, the South African National Editors Forum (SANEF) (this and other responses will be discussed in chapter 4). The tabloids' entry into the post-apartheid mediated public sphere also came under pressure from the journalistic community itself.
Tabloids and the Post-Apartheid Media Sphere: Political Pressures
If the mediated public sphere contracted as a result of economic forces, it has also been subject to political pressures. As with many other aspects of the media in contemporary South Africa, the political dimension of tabloid newspapers is best understood against a historical background.
Under apartheid, the White press was a "pivotal institution in the racially and ethnically based struggles for economic and political power" (Horwitz 2001, 36). The mainstream commercial print media were broadly divided along ideological lines that corresponded with ethnic and linguistic differences in the White community. They made only limited attempts to cater to Black or "Coloured" (mixed-race) audiences (e.g., in separate, "extra" editions). While English-language newspapers were linked to the interests of mining capital (and provided a limited, liberal critique of apartheid), Afrikaans-language newspapers supported Afrikaner nationalism and the apartheid state. They served as key institutions for the articulation of nationalist ideology, even while some of them questioned the establishment from time to time (Tomaselli and Dunn 2001; Horwitz 2001). In the post-apartheid era, the Afrikaans and English press became de-linked from these ideologies, repositioned themselves according to the new political landscape, and adopted a more commercialized approach.
The apartheid regime put an extensive set of legal measures in place to control the media and limit criticism of itself. For instance, it was forbidden to quote or publish photographs of certain leaders in the freedom struggle (like Nelson Mandela) or to publish information that could be perceived as threatening the security of the state. Critical journalists and editors from the anti-apartheid press were censored, banished, harassed, and imprisoned (see Wasserman and De Beer 2005). This history of both complicity with the apartheid regime (on the part of the Afrikaans press and the SABC) and government interference and repression (especially with regard to journalists with a "struggle" background) resulted in the post-apartheid media being extremely vigilant of any attempt by the government to meddle in its affairs and suspicious of any media that could be seen to toe the government line. Although freedom of expression was guaranteed in the post-apartheid constitution agreed upon in 1996, this right has often been understood in different ways. As a result, the media and the government were in disagreement on several occasions (De Beer 2002; Fourie 2002; Shepperson and Tomaselli 2002).
The initial years of democracy were marked by a mutual mistrust between media and government. The government had misgivings about the media's demographic repres ent at ion, seeing ownership and editorial staff as being too White (see Mandela 1994a). For their part, many members of the media industry anticipated that the new ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), would pose a threat to media freedom. This pessimistic expectation could perhaps be understood against the trends of governmental interference in the media elsewhere in Africa (Duncan 2003, 5), but has also been linked to "racist and misplaced associations" of the new government with authoritarianism (Jacobs 2003, 132).
The tense relationship between the new government and the media became especially evident during two investigations into the media conducted soon after the formal democratic transition took place. The first investigation, into the media's role during the apartheid era, formed part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) hearings (1996). The second investigation was conducted by the Human Rights Commission (HRC) (1999/2000), following a complaint by the Black Lawyers Association and the Association of Black Accountants of South Africa about alleged racism in the media.
These investigations provided some of the earliest instances of friction between the media sector and the newly elected government and its related institutions that would only increase over the coming years despite formal efforts to manage the relationship through initiatives like the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS), which was tasked with facilitating government's communication with the media. In the case of the TRC, the Afrikaans media giant Naspers, whose publications (albeit in varying degrees) had supported the apartheid regime, refused to testify in front of the commission — which resulted in a small rebel group of journalists submitting their own declaration. In the case of the HRC investigation, the media in general met the commission with "scorn and incredulity" and responded with discursive strategies of denial of racism (Durrheim et al. 2005). Critical questions were asked of the media's role in society after apartheid, but both commissions approached racism largely in terms of prejudice and representation and failed to ask broader, structural questions regarding the intersection of the South African media, the market, and race (see Krabill 2001, 591–596; Rhodes Journalism Review 1997; Johnson and Jacobs 2004).
Whereas the media were objects of scrutiny under the Mandela presidency, it often clashed outright with Mandela's successor, Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki's relations with the media have been generally poor (Chotia and Jacobs 2002, 157). The bulk of the debate in professional and academic journalistic circles during the Mbeki presidency was framed in terms of "media freedom" and "independence." The government was seen as encroaching upon the media's constitutionally guaranteed freedom, among other things through attempts by senior ANC members to acquire ownership of Johncom, a company which owns several influential newspapers; a proposed Film and Publications Amendment Bill which would make pre-publication censorship of the news media possible; and ANC plans to establish a media tribunal as an alternative to self-regulation by the Press Ombudsman (who adjudicates complaints by the public against the press) (SANEF 2007). The perceived influence by the government on the public broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), has become a recurring theme in media reports, and an antagonistic relationship between the print media and the SABC has developed. In 2007, this antagonism came to a head when the SABC withdrew from the South African National Editors' Forum after the Sunday Times published allegations of alcohol abuse on the part of the health minister, Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, while illegally in possession of her hospital records. This conflict took place in a tense run-up to the election of the new ANC president at the party's general conference in Polokwane in December 2007. When Jacob Zuma emerged victorious from this conference, he was immediately scrutinized for his view of the media. In one of his first weekly emailed "Letters from the President," Zuma slammed the media, writing that it was "politically and ideologically out of synch with the society in which it exists ... a product of the various political, social, economic and cultural forces that exist within a society," and a "major arena in the battle of ideas" between those with economic power that seek to "reinforce their privileged position" and those who "campaign for a media that serves the cause of a more equitable society" (ANC 2008). For this criticism, Zuma was branded by the South African National Editors Forum as harboring a "hostile state of mind towards the media" (SANEF 2008).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tabloid Journalism in South Africa by Herman Wasserman. Copyright © 2010 Herman Wasserman. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
1 Shock! Horror! Scandal! The Tabloid Controversy and Journalism Studies in Post-Apartheid South Africa 1
2 Attack of the Killer Newspapers! Tabloids Arrive in South Africa 14
3 Black and White and Read All Over: Tabloids and the Glocalization of Popular Media 43
4 Not Really Newspapers: Tabloids and the South African Journalistic Paradigm 58
5 The Revolution Will Be Printed: Tabloids, Citizenship, and Democratic Politics in Post-Apartheid South Africa 80
6 Truth or Trash? Understanding Tabloid Journalism and Lived Experience 118
7 Often They Cry with the People: The Professional Identities of Tabloid Journalists 151
8 Conclusion: Telling Stories 175
Notes 181
References 197
Index 209
What People are Saying About This
"Wasserman's sound research and keen analysis make this book valuable as a sociological source on race and ethnicity in South Africa, as well as a resource on communication and journalism. Studying the tiers of racial communication in a country emerging from decades of apartheid, Wasserman (Univ. of Sheffield, UK, and Univ. of Stellenbosch, South Africa) includes insights into political strife on the African continent in general and how that strife correlates with a high illiteracy rate among the indigenous population. One gains understanding of the status and value of tabloid papers in the recently democratized country, and also of their connection to the marginalized black majority. The author addresses the question of whether tabloids are a lesser form of journalism and argues convincingly that they are not, at least in South Africa. Wasserman's close study and comparison of the various styles in, and changes to, newspapers in general expand the volume's usefulness to those interested in print journalism in the 21st century generally. And his discussion of various well-known newspapers and formats provides solid journalistic background for those interested in international communication trends. An excellent study that is easy to read and understand. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. — Choice"
Wasserman's sound research and keen analysis make this book valuable as a sociological source on race and ethnicity in South Africa, as well as a resource on communication and journalism. Studying the tiers of racial communication in a country emerging from decades of apartheid, Wasserman (Univ. of Sheffield, UK, and Univ. of Stellenbosch, South Africa) includes insights into political strife on the African continent in general and how that strife correlates with a high illiteracy rate among the indigenous population. One gains understanding of the status and value of tabloid papers in the recently democratized country, and also of their connection to the marginalized black majority. The author addresses the question of whether tabloids are a lesser form of journalism and argues convincingly that they are not, at least in South Africa. Wasserman's close study and comparison of the various styles in, and changes to, newspapers in general expand the volume's usefulness to those interested in print journalism in the 21st century generally. And his discussion of various well-known newspapers and formats provides solid journalistic background for those interested in international communication trends. An excellent study that is easy to read and understand. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. — Choice
A much needed media history and political and social assessment of a genre that is currently very much the subject of conjecture.
Convincing, bold, and provocative. The rise of mass circulating tabloids and their popularity with the poor and working class black majority are indicative of a post-apartheid South Africa determined to renegotiate an ethics of inclusion and a common humanity in journalism.
Wasserman's sound research and keen analysis make this book valuable as a sociological source on race and ethnicity in South Africa, as well as a resource on communication and journalism. Studying the tiers of racial communication in a country emerging from decades of apartheid, Wasserman (Univ. of Sheffield, UK, and Univ. of Stellenbosch, South Africa) includes insights into political strife on the African continent in general and how that strife correlates with a high illiteracy rate among the indigenous population. One gains understanding of the status and value of tabloid papers in the recently democratized country, and also of their connection to the marginalized black majority. The author addresses the question of whether tabloids are a lesser form of journalism and argues convincingly that they are not, at least in South Africa. Wasserman's close study and comparison of the various styles in, and changes to, newspapers in general expand the volume's usefulness to those interested in print journalism in the 21st century generally. And his discussion of various well-known newspapers and formats provides solid journalistic background for those interested in international communication trends. An excellent study that is easy to read and understand. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. — Choice
Hugely important for students, journalists, scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners. A much needed book that will contribute, both empirically and theoretically, to ongoing debates about popular culture, media globalization, and changing news discourses.