After Apartheid: Reinventing South Africa?

Contested Media Environments in South Africa: The Making of Communications Policy since 1994

Contested Media Environments in South Africa The Making of Communications Policy since 1994 Guy Berger The democratic transition in South Africa has seen complex developments over who controls communications. Unlike the apartheid era of racist state control, aspirations for a nonracial and pluralistic landscape have largely been fulfilled. However, during the democratic period, there has been increased involvement by government in communications policymaking, and a decline in participatory opportunities and processes. This situation reflects the government’s desire to steer communications for reasons that are professedly “transformational,” in the sense of deepening nonracialism, democracy , or development (even if in effect not always such), and also sometimes politically self-serving. In overview, the postapartheid government’s commitment to a mixed economy has entailed the inherently contradictory approach of “managed liberalization” in the communications arena. This approach in turn has given both space and cause for (mainly) elite interests to contest the government ’s handling of a range of policy matters. The institutions of Parliament and the communications regulatory authority have been sites of this contestation . Government has also had to temper its managerial inclinations owing to changing technologies that complicate attempts at regulation, and the inexorable marketization of the arena as a result of liberalization. The contemporary reality is one of elite pluralism, with a vibrant diversity of actors , even if civil society is far from having the influence it anticipated having at the dawn of democracy. These developments are especially evident in public broadcasting, where the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has been challenged Contested Media Environments in South Africa 333 on its political independence, transformational role, editorial policies, business model, and license conditions. There has also been major contestation around policy and law concerning the independence and authority of the regulator, the power of the minister, and communications convergence. Technological and market dynamics in all this flux presage a future of continuing , even intensified, elite contestation, with the role of government ultimately being diminished—for both better and worse. STATE-MEDIA RELATIONS IN PERSPECTIVE Racial politics dominated media under apartheid; less color-conscious economics came to the fore after South Africa’s first decade of democracy (see Netshitenzhe 2004; Wasserman 2004; Fourie n.d.). This does not mean an absence of policy and politics: the intense commercialization of the country’s media, and especially broadcasting, is a function of specific policies and law, their practical effect, and contestation around these. That the market increasingly rules in South African media does not mean the absence of political choices and disagreements. Further, the market dispensation has not excluded state attempts to control or co-opt media and the regulator. However, overall, the configuration of the communications landscape has diminished the power of the state in this space. Such a situation perpetuates elite pluralism rather than allowing for control of communications by a consolidated ruling bloc. The postapartheid communications environment, insofar as media and to a lesser extent telecommunications are concerned, has its origins in “negotiated liberalisation” (Horwitz 2001a, 2001b). Democratic South Africa evolved from a “progressive” policy environment with participatory and deliberative stakeholder politics to a top-down, state-directed liberalization applied mainly in the interests of industry, which increasingly means that the market, not the state, dominates the communications environment. This evolution to a market-driven media policy has been assessed in liberal terms, as in the following quotation: Every few years, it seems, the mandarins of communication make a bid to take power away from the broadcasting regulator, Icasa [the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa]. The pattern has been regular: they table a new Bill that lessens Icasa’s independence, every industry player goes to parliament and unanimously and unequivocally warns that this is unconstitutional, damaging to our broadcasting in- 334 Guy Berger dustry and against everything we are preaching to the region, the continent and the world about the need for independent regulation. (Harber 2006) To caricature this perspective slightly, it reads postapartheid history as evidencing the existence of a power-hungry state held at bay by a communications industry seeking freedom. In this view, government reluctantly concedes to liberalization because it is pressured to, although it would really prefer a command model in relation to communications, and this motive frequently comes to the fore. Such a perspective is overly simplistic. It entails the a priori assumption of a control-seeking government (i.e., antidemocratic ) that inexorably moves toward...