TY - JOUR
T1 - Television news in South Africa
T2 - mediating an emerging democracy
AU - Cottle, Simon
AU - Rai, Mugdha
N1 - Funding Information:
*We would like to acknowledge the Australian Research Council for funding the research project ‘Television Journalism and Deliberative Democracy: A Comparative International Study of Communicative Architecture and Democratic Deepening’ (DP0449505) that forms the basis of this article. We would like to thank Dr Linda Venter of Monash University, South Africa for her help in collecting news samples, preparing background information and conducting interviews, as well as Andrea Duckworth for helping with the preparation of some of the data for this article. 1 C. Barnett, ‘Contradictions of Radio Broadcasting Reforms in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Review of African Political Economy, 25, 78 (1998), pp. 551–70. The quotation is from p. 552; A. Aginam, ‘Media in “Globalizing” Africa: What Prospect for Democratic Communication?’, in R. Hackett and Y. Zhao (eds), Democratizing Global Media: One World, Many Struggles (Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), pp. 121–41. 2 Aginam, ‘Media in “Globalizing” Africa’; C. Barnett, Culture and Democracy: Media, Space and Representation (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2003); W. Mano, ‘Exploring the African View of the Global’, Global Media and Communication, 1, 1 (2005), pp. 50–5.
Copyright:
Copyright 2008 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2008/6
Y1 - 2008/6
N2 - The emergence of democracy in South Africa has given rise to considerable debate and discussion surrounding the renewed role of the broadcasting media. The role of South African television news in enabling and enacting democratic processes, however, remains largely unnoticed and under-theorised. This article reports on recent research that secures added empirical purchase on South African television journalism today and does so by analytically identifying, systematically mapping and pursuing into the production domain the repertoire of communicative frames that characterise contemporary South African television news both within as well as across the daily news programmes delivered by the public broadcaster, SABC, and the private network, eTV. Our findings document that there is considerably more complexity in the field of television news than has so far been acknowledged or explored and these complexities have direct bearing on debates about the establishment and enhancement of 'democracy' in South Africa's diverse, fractured and troubled polity.
AB - The emergence of democracy in South Africa has given rise to considerable debate and discussion surrounding the renewed role of the broadcasting media. The role of South African television news in enabling and enacting democratic processes, however, remains largely unnoticed and under-theorised. This article reports on recent research that secures added empirical purchase on South African television journalism today and does so by analytically identifying, systematically mapping and pursuing into the production domain the repertoire of communicative frames that characterise contemporary South African television news both within as well as across the daily news programmes delivered by the public broadcaster, SABC, and the private network, eTV. Our findings document that there is considerably more complexity in the field of television news than has so far been acknowledged or explored and these complexities have direct bearing on debates about the establishment and enhancement of 'democracy' in South Africa's diverse, fractured and troubled polity.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=46649083203&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/03057070802038017
DO - 10.1080/03057070802038017
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:46649083203
SN - 0305-7070
VL - 34
SP - 343
EP - 358
JO - Journal of Southern African Studies
JF - Journal of Southern African Studies
IS - 2
ER -