In the midst of his killing spree last week, the Virginia-Tech killer took time off to pop into a post office and send his multimedia manifesto to a major television network. Then he went back to the campus to shoot more of his fellow students. Cho Seung-hui, it seems, had pre-recorded a video, indicating that his killing was not an outburst, but a planned event. And, like all good event planners, he had his media schedule in hand.
Continue Reading April 24th, 2007
I am pleased to see that the Department of Communications has been quick to back off from the threat to stop the licensing of new pay-TV operations.
Continue Reading April 12th, 2007
The Minister of Communications has threatened to delay the licensing of new pay-TV channels for two years. What on earth is going on? How can this happen?
Continue Reading March 27th, 2007
The furious attack on the BBC by ANC representative Smuts Ngonyama has been replaced on the ruling party’s website by a full text of the BBC’s response and a much more conciliatory statement by Ngonyama. Perhaps someone told Ngonyama that he had overstepped the mark.
Continue Reading February 27th, 2007
There is an episode of that brilliant television drama set in the White House, West Wing, when two of the men close to the incumbent president are discussing who to endorse as his replacement. “What happened to the days when a few crusty old men sat in a smoke-filled room and chose the candidate over cigars and port. They didn’t choose so badly. They chose men like Roosevelt and Truman,� one of them says. I don’t know what happened in the US to change this, but I do know what happened in this country. The Minister of Health, bless her soul, banned smoke-filled rooms, forcing things out into the open.
Continue Reading February 25th, 2007
Even if you accept the current framework of SABC news - that a major part of their mandate is to communicate government’s message to their audience - then you have to wonder about their coverage of of Friday’s State of the Nation speech.
Continue Reading February 11th, 2007
Imagine if sometime in the next few months the SABC lined up all the possible successors to President Thabo Mbeki and questioned them live on air about their policies and their suitability for the top job. It would be a public service par excellence.
Continue Reading January 17th, 2007
Is endless choice in media always a good thing? We are going to find out soon, as new subscription broadcasters are due to be licensed.
Continue Reading October 24th, 2006
It is a sad day when a media company is going to court to stop the dissemination of information by another media company. That is what SABC did on the weekend, when it sought an urgent interdict to make the M&G remove from its website the report of the inquiry into its newsroom.
Continue Reading October 16th, 2006
The SABC has been sitting on the report of the Sisulu commission of inquiry into their news operation for over a week now, debating whether to release it in full or in an abbreviated version. I am going to save them the trouble. The report, according to at least two people who have read it, cites eight incidents in which the CEO of news, Snuki Zikalala, broke the SABC’s own editorial code of conduct by restricting the use of certain commentators and analysts for reasons that were not “objectively justifiable�.
Continue Reading October 11th, 2006
Every now and then a journalist asks a question that opens one’s eyes. The question is usually irritatingly simple, and often it is the naivete of a foreign reporter asking the obvious that gets one thinking. A German journalist asked me the other day why we are so passionate about the SABC. I was about to give her the pat answers about the troubled history of broadcasting in the country and the size of the SABC, which makes it more important and powerful than most public broadcasters. Then I realized that there was something else happening here.
Continue Reading August 5th, 2006
The SABC, I said in this week’s Wolpe discussion forum in Cape Town, is plagued by a culture of enthusiastic upward referral - the desire, in a situation of fear and trepidation, to avoid difficult decisions. And I began to put together what I think is the kind of journalism one can expect from a public broadcaster.
Continue Reading August 5th, 2006
SABC’s Sisulu Commission is going to hear some hot new evidence: the story of how head of news Snuki Zikalala sneaked a preview of a current affairs show for the gentlemen of the presidency - without telling those who made the programme.
Continue Reading July 18th, 2006
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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)
Reflections on Journalism in the Transition to Democracy - Ethics & International Affairs 18, no. 3 (2004).
Journalism in the Age of the Market
- Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture, Centre for Civil Society, University of KZN, Aug 2002
The Untimely Death of SA’s Finest Daily - Sunday Times, May 2005
“Two Newspapers, Two Nations? The Media and the Xenophobic Violence” from Go Home or Die Here, edited by Shireen Hassim Tawana Kupe and Eric Worby (WUP, 2008)
Remarks at Goedgedacht Forum, October 2008
The rise of social network journalism - From The 2009 Flux Trend Review (Macmillan, 2008)
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