» eTV on African shopping spree

eTV on African shopping spree

April 3rd, 2006

eTV’s Marcel Golding has been hopping around the continent buying TV and radio stations. I am told that he has acquired one in Nigeria, one in Uganda, and has been snooping around places like Mozambique.
He has been awfully quiet about it, but if he and his colleague John Copelyn are involved, you can be sure there is a large-scale and audacious strategy behind these moves.
Golding and Copelyn have now turned eTV into a cash-spinner, largely through throwing out any pretensions to quality television and serving up cheap and popular programming such as wrestling and late-night soft-porn. I suspect it is this formula that they intend to take across the continent.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Radio, TV

3 Comments Add your own

1. Jacquie Golding-Duffy | April 12th, 2006 at 9:40 pm

Having been fortunate enough to be one of your Weekly Mail cadets in the early Nineties, I learnt much under your guidance - including being drilled to check and double check spelling. Therefore, I must insist you get a spelling correct: Marcel (without the extra l).
Great website.
2. Anton | April 13th, 2006 at 7:09 am

Corrected. Thank you.
3. Qondile Khedama | June 22nd, 2006 at 11:25 am

I have been following you during the case of Stompie Seipei during those days and it is clear to me that the older you become the sharper you are.
I think you are a good example to new generation in journalism.
Though I am not working as journalist this website sharpens my news/journalistic instincts.

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Anton Harber: Media

Professor Anton Harber directs the Journalism and Media Studies Programme at Wits University. He is former editor of the Mail & Guardian.
Full bio

Daily newspaper sales, South Africa
(Ave sales Jul-Dec)
1960 - 681 053 (Population 17,3m)
1970 - 723 566 (22m)
1980 - 803 229 (27,5m)
1990 - 1 214 396 (35,2m)
2000 - 1 117 886 (44m)
2006 - 1 600 000 (47,3m)
2011 - 1 310 000 (49m)

(Sources: ABC and nationmaster.com)

“It was pure political theatre. The excited room was filled with government officials, government consultants, quasi-government agencies, politicians and pupils from government schools. As if on cue, the room rang with applause as one education victory after another was claimed. This was, after all, the annual drama in which the minister of basic education appears on stage to announce the Grade 12 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results …” - Educationist Jonathan Jansen, one of the few with the credibility to look critically at this “celebratory orgy of mediocrity”.

“The (Incwala) ceremony is cloaked in secrecy and marks the (Swaziland) king’s return to public life after a period of withdrawal and spiritual contemplation. Among its highlights is a symbolic demonstration by the king of his power and dominance in a process involving his penetration of a black bull … But last year’s selected bull, according to a recent account from a whistle-blowing Incwala initiate, objected strongly, and threw off Africa’s last absolute monarch.” - Some surprises in this (un-bylined) account of Swaziland politics in Southern African Report

“When the Great Zucchini arrived that Saturday morning, Don had no idea who he was. Frankly, he didn’t look like a great anything. He looked like a house painter, Don thought, with some justification. He wears no costume. He was in painter’s pants, a coffee-stained shirt and a two-day growth of beard. He toted his beat-up props in beat-up steamer trunks, with ripped faux leather and broken hinges hanging askew.” - A classic of magazine profiling, by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post.

Diepsloot (Jonathan Ball, 2011)

Diesploot: Of Frogs and Fractals, a public lecture at the University of Johannesburg, 4 August 2011

Troublemakers - The Best of South Africa’s Investigative Journalism (Jacana, 2101), edited by Anton Harber and Margaret Renn

Introduction - The Troublemakers: An account of the rise of a new wave of investigative journalism in South Africa.

What is Left Unsaid: Reporting the South African HIV Epidemic, edited by Kristin Palitza, Natalie Ridgard, Helen Struthers and Anton Harber (Fanele, 2010)