Alternative media are bringing change from GroundUp

WITS University’s Journalism and Media Studies Department has just published its latest State of the Newsroom report.

The annual publication charts key developments on the country’s media landscape – from changes in circulation and audiences and media ownership, digital trends, transformation of the news media, political, legal and regulatory issues, and the status of media freedom.

The Conversation’s politics and society editor Thabo Leshilo asks the editor and lead researcher: What is the State of the Newsroom report and what does it say?

State of the Newsroom 2015/16, known as Inside/Outside, tries to capture the dynamic of multiple sources of media and news, with a lot falling outside of the “mainstream” news.

Although we still have “newsrooms” and media houses in the normal sense, there are also vibrant independent media sites and projects, such as The Daily Vox, Daily Maverick, GroundUp, and projects such as The Justice Project SA that “write into the news”.

During the recent #FeesMustFall protests, students and academics reported from the front line using social media, and were a source of news from the coalface. The #FeesMustfall campaign showed how independent news producers, such as The Daily Vox, could cover unfolding events more effectively than the mainstream media, and how student social media impacted on the coverage offered by the mainstream.

This begs the question: What exactly do we mean by the “newsroom” today? This State of the Newsroom tries to contribute to the discussion on this phenomenon.

Are there causes for concern? What are the most significant ones, especially in the era of fake news?

If we look at the media landscape generally, there are good and bad signs. For instance, the Press Council is reinvigorating itself and has an ombudsman for online media. SA National Editors’ Forum has been vocal on media freedom. There are new measurements for broadcast statistics.

I think the diversity of content available is undeniably good. But retrenchments continue, and newspaper circulation is down. For the first time free newspapers declined in circulation too.

The gover nment has bungled the terrestrial digital TV process – again. The SABC remains a mess, and the desire by the state to control news is felt increasingly, be it through the Media Appeals Tribunal proposal or draft legislation that tries to tighten the grip on the free flow of information.

Other signs of concern are the influence management has on editors. Editorial independence in the newsroom is being corroded.

As for fake news, in some ways I think it’s a red herring. I hope it will only make news consumers more critical and start to question the veracity of what’s read through habit. More worrying is when fake news starts to look like deliberate propaganda. This goes hand-in-hand with the willingness of political parties and other public speakers to be less than truthful or deliberately feed the public false facts.

How do we regard the growth of alternative news platforms, including the ANC’s in-house news service and the government’s increased use of social media to report on themselves?

I think we need to be careful about calling some of these initiatives “alternative”, which in South Africa has a positive, politically progressive history in terms of news media.

I have mentioned some initiatives that could be described in this way. However, we are also seeing in South Africa what happens all over the world: social media and the internet being used by the state and its allies and supporters to create a counter-narrative. Perhaps we should call it propaganda 2. There’s nothing necessarily unusual about that.

What are the positives and dangers associated with such alternative news platforms as seen against the role of a free press in a democracy?

I think we need to start at the beginning and ask: What does a free press really look like? What do we want? Does the Windhoek declaration on press freedom matter any longer? Do journalists care about human rights? Are they prepared to be watchdogs to those rights? And if they aren’t, is our press free?

Just as there’s no point talking about a free press if there is unfettered state control, there’s no point talking about a free press if editors are told what’s in the public interest by advertisers and managers.

We have the constitutional guarantees, and indices such as Freedom House say we are free. We are cer- tainly more free than other African states, such as Angola, The Gambia or Zimbabwe.

But we also know that journalists are kept under surveillance – or at least feel they are, which is just as bad – and reporters are kicked out of press conferences, and increasingly coming under physical threat from students, party supporters, police or private security firms while covering events.

There’s no generally accepted idea of a free press floating around.

At the same time, what contribution the media can make to democracy is not necessarily being answered by what’s being published by mainstream media. Instead, as Levi Kabwato, one of the authors in this year’s State of the Newsroom who looked at transfor mation in the press, found editors saying they received more threats from owners and executives than from politicians in their entire term as editor. The people we had to be careful of were the owners. I received more threat- ening letters from companies than politicians. Owners are the real threat to media freedom.

We have to think of transformation more broadly than just how many black people or women are employed in a newsroom, or in terms of ownership. It’s about content too – what’s covered, and why.

This is why the independent and alternative media platforms are so interesting.

Just look what The Daily Vox says about itself: It wants to “put the young citizen at the centre of news”. GroundUp says: “We report news that is in the public interest, with an emphasis on the human rights of vulnerable communities.”

And they are doing it with a fraction of the budget that big media houses have at their disposal. Good journalism doesn’t necessarily have to cost money. – The Conversation Africa

Finlay is a lecturer in Journalism and Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand