Radical new Broadcasting Bill contains the good, the bad and the very ugly

October 31st, 2009

The Public Broadcasting Bill published this week contains some good things, some bad things and some very bad things. If it is adopted in its current form, it will take us a away from public broadcasting and back towards state broadcasting again.

It is scrappy piece of legislation that shows the signs of hurried drafting and a rush to parliament. No doubt the new Minister wants to show he can act quickly and wants to take advantage of the current SABC crisis. He has by-passed the traditional White Paper-to-Green Paper-to-legislation route, and cut corners to get it into place within a few months of getting into office. I am not sure how such a radical change to the broadcasting landscape can be rushed in this way. Undue haste could lead to serious consequences.

The legislation gives the Minister much more power over broadcasting than he has had before, and creates a whole raft of new statutory bodies to complicate the broadcasting sector.

Its main features are:

* The end of the licensing system and the introduction of a special tax to pay for public broadcasting. This is not a bad idea. The licensing system was not working and a special tax is at least OUR money, rather than a departmental grant. In other words, if it is our money, we can demand that the broadcasting serves the public; if it comes from the department, it can be used to manipulate the public broadcaster, much as the department has used its control over Icasa’s budget to influence that body. It also takes us away from the regressive format of the licensing model , which is an improvement.

But it is not at all clear that the Treasury would allow a special tax, having resisted all such forms of taxation for many years. What might be a compromise would be to keep it as a licence fee, and just allow SARS to collect it more efficiently than the SABC can do itself.

* The introduction of a Public Broadcasting Fund. This is potentially a good idea, as it is preferable to direct funding of the SABC and allows other broadcasters and producers to access the fund as well to do public service work. However, there are not enough details to know if this fund will be independent of political influence, how it will divide its money up, or how it will handle such a large sum of money for so many different things. The fund is intended to cover everything from public broadcasting and programme creation to Sentech, the signal distributor, and a new Museum of Broadcasting and Signal Distribution, created in the Bill.

*The creation of three new boards: a Local Content Advisory Board (to advise the Minister on how to develop local content), a Public Service Broadcasting Advisory Board (to advise the Minister on all public service broadcasting matters), and a Panel to evaluate the performance of the SABC board (set up with Parliament to measure board members against performance criteria). All of these appear to undermine the roles of existing bodies, such as the regulator, Icasa, and the parliamentary committee. The big difference is these new bodies will be appointed by the Minister. Rather than take on the existing independent bodies, the Minister appear to want to introduce a whole new level of bodies which answer directly to him and which appear likely to undermine the roles of Icasa or parliament.

* New channels: the Bill bizarrely obligates the SABC to apply within 12 months for a licence for extra channels which deal with education, health, youth, sports, SMMEs, parliamentary services and “government and interactive services”. Since the SABC has not coped with its current load, and since there has been no funding for the extra two regional channels created in earlier legislation, it is easy to dismiss this as wishful thinking. However, by creating new channels in this way, the Minister is circumventing both the regulator, whose job it is to allocate licences, and the SABC itself, which should be deciding what needs to be on its channels.

There is also an argument to be had about whether it is either healthy or desirable for the SABC to get even bigger than its current size, which already dominates the television and radio sectors.

* The Bill reaffirms that the SABC’s commercial channels will cross-subsidise the public service channels, and ignores the fact that this model has been a clear failure. At the moment, the subsidisation is actually working the other way, since public service channel SABC1 makes enough money to subsidise the loss-making commercial channel SABC3. This needs to be fixed, rather than perpetuated.

*The Bill creates a new International Division in SABC to absorb Channel Africa and promote international broadcasting. But in doing so it undermines the SABC’s independence, by saying that this division will promote the country’s foreign policy.

* The Minister is given extraordinary powers: he can make regulations on any matter connected to public service broadcasting; he may direct any of the bodies mentioned in the Bill (this includes the SABC board and Icasa) to take any action if they are unable to perform their functions; he may instruct the SABC board to take any action if they are being mismanaged or unable to perform effectively. This gives him unprecedented powers to get done what he wants done, and to interfere at all sorts of levels.

* Community media must now be run “in partnership with municipalities”. It is not clear at all what this means, but it seems clear that it threatens the independence of community broadcasters. In many smaller towns, one would expect community media to give voice to those who are taking on their local authorities for their poor service delivery, and this is unlikely to happen if they are linked to municipalities. Enforcing a partnership with the state goes contrary to the notion that community media should be controlled and owned by communities.

There are a number of other smaller aspects of the Bill which I can only believe are simple errors. The Bill says that community stations will in future have to comply with the Public Finance Management Act, a change that would close down this sector within weeks. That could not have been the Minister’s intention.

Underlying all these changes is the notion that public broadcasting must now serve the developmental state. The Bill is explicit in its goal of “aligning the broadcasting system to the development goals of the Republic”.

The problem is that it is never explicit what this means. Previous attempts to align public broadcasting with developmental goals - such as in many newly-independent African countries in the 1960s - proved disastrous as it reduced the media to purveyors of sunshine journalism. For decades, that experience discredited the notion of development journalism, until a new notion emerged that also embraced a media that was independent and critical.

But if you combine the idea of aligning public media with the development state and the Minister’s desire for much greater control over the SABC and Icasa, then the warning signals are flashing brightly.

The Minister has only allowed for a month of discussion of this Bill until it is tabled before Parliament. Let’s hope it is a month of intense debate. And let’s hope he is prepared to take the time and trouble to fix some of the problems.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Media regulation