Tabloid Journalism in South Africa: True Story!

Notes

Notes 1. Shock! Horror! Scandal! 1. See, for example, “South Africa gets the newspapers it deserves,” The Observer, November 14, 2004, and “Tabloid grabs South African market,” BBC Two This World, October 17, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolpda/ifs_news/hi/newsid_6045000/ 6045650.stm (accessed February 2, 2009). 2. Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), January–March 2008, and All Media Products Survey (AMPS), February–November 2007. 3. “Totally tabloid,” ABC Radio National, February 2, 2006, http://www.abc.net.au/ rn/talks/8.30/mediarpt/stories/s1560445.htm (accessed February 2, 2009). The Daily Sun’s manager, Fergus Sampson, sees this rumored re-selling of papers once they’ve been read as “one hell of a compliment” (pers. comm. 2007). 4. Karl Brophy, editor of the Cape Town daily tabloid the Daily Voice (pers. comm. 2007), sees the term “mainstream media” applying to tabloids rather than broadsheets : “Given that the Daily Sun is, quite clearly, the biggest selling newspaper in the country and accepting that the Daily Voice is, by far, the biggest selling newspaper in Cape Town how do we (i.e., us and the Daily Sun) not qualify as the ‘mainstream media’? Surely we are the mainstream media and the Cape Times et al are ’niche media.’” Brophy has a point, but I nevertheless prefer to use the term “mainstream media” to refer to broadsheet newspapers and commercial and public (not community) broadcasters, since these media preceded the entry of the tabloids on the market and still dominate the discourse about professional journalism, as was evident from the clash between tabloid editors and other members of the South African National Editors’ Forum, notably at the 2005 SANEF Annual General Meeting in Cape Town (Barratt 2006, 57). Although the tone of debate at the latter was “exclusionary” (F. Haffajee, pers. comm., 2007), SANEF issued a statement in which the tabloids were welcomed as a “vibrant part of the changing landscape” (Barratt 2006, 57). My choice to refer to broadsheets and the like as “mainstream” is therefore informed by not circulation figures but by the balance of power in journalistic discourse in the country, which might well change over time. The use of “mainstream media” for non-tabloid media is also employed by Conboy (2005,10), who also distinguishes between “elite press” and “popular tabloids” within the British context. I will, in some instances , use “elite press” interchangeably with “mainstream press,” especially when referring to the sections of society served by the established (non-tabloid) print media. 5. The ruling party, the African National Congress (see ANC 2008), has also made this point, which is seen by its critics as a ploy by government to obtain more control over the media. 6. Johncom’s name was changed in 2007 to Avusa Ltd. 7. This criticism followed Zuma’s defamation suit in 2006 for R63 million against various media after he had been acquitted of rape charges. 182 Notes to pages 8–19 8. Zelizer’s three-pronged typology of journalism follows the title of the new International Communication Association journal in which her article appeared— Communication, Culture and Critique (ed. Karen Ross). 9. The argument alluded to in these paragraphs is worked out in more detail in Rao and Wasserman (2007), which in turn draws on the important intervention by Shome and Hegde (2002). 2. Attack of the Killer Newspapers! 1. “The ‘Berliner’ may not be too little, but is it too late?,” Independent on Sunday, July 4, 2004. 2. According to Grabe, Zhou, and Barnett (2001, 638), the formal aspects of sensationalism have received much less consideration in scholarly work than its content. 3. Several explanations could be offered for the difference between my qualitative study of audience responses and the U.S. effects studies by Grabe et al. (2000, 2001). One obvious difference is that of context and the difference in class and social position between the majority of my respondents and those in the U.S. studies, where the majority of the participants were educated or belonged to the middle class (although half the respondents of one of the studies were manual laborers, and, although not statistically significant, and therefore unreported, there was a difference in terms of credibility measures between the high and low education groups—Grabe, pers. comm.). Another explanation could be that the response of the South African tabloid readers should be understood on the level of emotional recall, while retention of content was not tested. Most likely, the difference in reports on...