Publication: Media Transformation & the Right to Communicate
As inequality deepens and social cohesion falters South Africa needs a media that can offer expression to the full range of voices and facilitate the substantive and complex debates about the social and economic future of the country.
Unfortunately, with high levels of concentration in ownership, widespread commercialisation and editorial cost cutting, and increasing threats to media freedom from government, our media is not well equipped for the challenges ahead.
There is a renewed call for ‘media transformation’ and a Media Appeals Tribunal (MAT) from the ruling party and others. Often these calls use the lack of ‘transformation’ to justify proposals to limit media freedom. Media freedom and transformation are two sides of the same coin. Without freedom the media would become the voice of the government. Without a more fundamental transformation than many imagine – including a greater diversity of ownership and non-commercial media that can serve the marginalised – the media will remain largely the voice of an economic elite.
In this sense both media transformation and the defence/expansion of media freedom are urgent and critical to future of our democracy.
Media Transformation and the Right to Communicate aims to unpack these issues and begin to shape a progressive media transformation agenda.
The publication was produced to inform a series of Media Transformation Summits Right2Know hosted in 2015.
