Election story must be told, despite tight media budgets
Two decades ago, the large news media houses would have had large teams of journalists going about the country, covering the president and the important opposition leaders as they hit the campaign trail.
The public broadcaster would have a dedicated team, comprising a television reporter, a camera person and a radio reporter, with a mandate to go wherever the president went. The team would be supported by at least two backup staffers who would be ready to fill in if logistics meant the main team couldn’t accompany the contender to every town and venue.
The same would be the case at publications such as the Sunday Times, where the most seasoned political correspondents would be assigned to shadow the main candidates.
Other journalists would criss-cross the country with a brief to tell the election story from the perspective of the voters — what are they most concerned about? What are the issues that will determine for whom they cast their votes? Have their lives improved or gone downhill since the last election, or over the longer term since the advent of democracy?
These assignments made for incredible journalism and helped the voters better understand the issues and promises that were at play.
Having journalists on the ground, especially when they visited under-reported areas outside the large urban centres, often shone the light on some of the pressing issues confronting communities who generally would not have had a voice to speak up and be heard.
One recalls a case, though not directly related to elections, where a group of journalists accompanied a president to a village where water taps had been installed for the first time.
It was a “good story to tell” for the president, as, for the first time in their lives, residents would no longer have to depend on fetching water daily from the nearby stream.
As the media flock had been to the area with the president — and therefore found the story to be newsworthy — one newspaper quickly sent a team of reporters back to the area when local residents complained that government promises had not been kept.
What the journalists found was that, a few days after the presidential and media entourages had left after the water project launch, taps started to run dry.
The community could not get anyone to take responsibility.
The negative press coverage that followed embarrassed the relevant government departments into action, resulting in the speedy resolution of the problem to residents’ satisfaction.
There are many other examples of journalists travelling to far-flung areas on the campaign trail — and uncovering stories of abandoned multimillion-rand social housing projects, residential toilets that are built in the middle of nowhere, and other service delivery horror stories.
Though the proliferation of social media means there are now more voices in the media space than there were, say, two decades ago, very few media houses can afford to spend as much as they used to on covering election campaigns to their satisfaction.
With reduced budgets, shrinking newsrooms and overworked reporters who are expected to churn out a couple of stories a day to feed the various digital and print platforms in their stable, editors are finding it incredibly hard to justify removing a reporter from the beat roster for a couple of days so they can focus on one subject or event.
In 2004, publications such as ours could afford to have teams shadowing party leaders such as Thabo Mbeki, the DA’s Tony Leon and the IFP’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi around the country and, at the end of that year, still had resources to send two correspondents to the US for that presidential election.
Now these publications are covering this campaign on a shoestring.
Such is the state of the media business today, not just in South Africa, but globally.
But even under such difficult circumstances — where retrenchments have gutted newsrooms and frightened some of the most talented away from the industry — we have a duty to report the stories as best as we can.
It is hard to imagine a thriving democracy without a robust, dynamic and fiercely independent media.
Even before the current crisis that is threatening the business models that underpin the industry, the media’s ability to effectively play its role as the fourth estate in our young democracy was undermined by the fact that its reach was largely limited to middle-class, English- or Afrikaans-speaking audiences; there were limited offerings for other language groups or those in the lower LSM groups upon which newspapers rely to sell advertising.
Access to information is a fundamental human right and there will always be a need for good quality journalism — albeit, perhaps for some, under revised business strategies.
In the meantime, especially as our country approaches what is being billed as the most significant general election since 1994, we see it as our duty to use whatever limited resources are available to help our readers make informed decisions when they cast their votes on May 29.