R2K Statement: Minister and Parliament stand for SABC censorship

R2K is outraged by Parliament’s decision to let the SABC off the hook, and abandoning the proposal for an inquiry into the crisis at the SABC. ANC MPs on the committee have been complicit in the decline of our public broadcaster and have acted in bad faith, failing to exercise their publicly entrusted responsibilities in ensuring an accountable SABC Board. Parliament has a crucial oversight role in terms of the Broadcasting Act and MPs must ensure that the broadcaster is publicly accountable. Yet at yesterday’s committee meeting, spineless MPs squandered the chance to rescue the SABC and chose to remain deaf to the public outcry at what is happening to our broadcaster. This is nothing short of a dereliction of duty and those MPs who have turned a blind eye to the SABC crisis ought to be recalled.

R2K has further noted Minister Faith Muthambi’s response to our pickets outside Parliament and the Department of Communications on August 23, in which she claims that our intention was simply to divert attention away from the Department’s Media Transformation Colloquium to be held later this week. She also took the opportunity to make the risible claim that R2K is opposed to media transformation.

We need not entertain this baseless claim at any length here. A simple glance at our website will show that we have long been fighting for media transformation since our inception as a campaign. If Minister Muthambi is seriously committed to media transformation then she should take  meaningful steps towards realising some of the key media transformation objectives we have demanded. These include:

1. Strengthening public broadcasting!

The SABC is the primary source of news and information for many, particularly poor and rural and working class communities. The public deserve public interest programming of the highest standard and news that is critical, accurate and not politically partisan. The SABC, which has lurched from crisis to crisis and been captured by an unaccountable political clique, needs to be saved. The board must be reconstituted through an open democratic process, the COO and other executives responsible for the censorship, purges and financial ruin must be fired in keeping with court rulings and the Public Protector’s findings, and mechanisms must be put in place to guarantee the SABC’s independence. The Minister must not be allowed to politically interfere in the SABC.

2. Providing better funding for community and small-scale alternative media! Community media plays a crucial role in giving voice to the concerns of grassroots communities and plugging the gaps left by the mainstream media, yet it is woefully underfunded, and government funding has been used to gut the independence of community media.

3. Supporting the transformation of ownership patterns and checking the power of media monopolies!

Media ownership is still disproportionately white and male and is highly concentrated in the hands of powerful media corporations, with just four companies dominating the print sector and supply chain. These companies have their own commercial and political interests that are often at odds with the public interest. It is simply bad news for media diversity when the media narrative is so strongly influenced by the commercial imperatives of only a handful of players. Big media organisations crowd out smaller competitors and we have witnessed, for instance, Media24 resort to unlawful business practices to undercut and destroy smaller publications. The monopolies must be rolled back.

4. Ensuring that the transition to digital TV is done in the best interests of the public, not in the narrow interests of big business!

We demand high-quality local content to be provided free-to-air after digital migration happens. Digital migration is an opportunity to dramatically improve the media on offer to ordinary South Africans and we cannot accept a situation in which we are left with what we have now – a two-tier system which provides a range of quality programming for the rich and substandard programming for the poor. We also demand free set-top boxes for all. We note, however, that in the DTT process the Minister is clearly beholden to white monopoly capital and has gone so far as to backtrack on government DTT policy to appease Naspers, much to the annoyance of her ANC colleagues.

The Minister’s role in propping up the authoritarian leadership of the SABC is not a stand for media transformation. It is a stand for censorship, intimidation and secrecy.