Can you believe what the SABC Chief Financial Officer, Robin Nicholson, said in Business Day? He tried to make out that he was just a bookkeeper and should not be held responsible for their over-spending.
Continue Reading 2 comments March 25th, 2009
Having opened up bureaux across the world, the SABC now has to plan the closure of most of them at a cost of many millions of rands. I am told by a senior and excellent source within the SABC that the budget for these bureaux is R500-m for the next three years - clearly not sustainable in a climate of severe cost-cutting.
Continue Reading 2 comments March 17th, 2009
Een of ander tyd verlede jaar daag ek by die SAUK op om aan SAFM se 08:00-debat deel te neem. In die ateljee vind ek twee onbemande televisiekameras en ’n paar aanmekaar geflanste baniere agter die aanbieder Jeremy Maggs.
Continue Reading Add comment March 14th, 2009
Sometime last year, I arrived at the SABC to participate in SAFM’s 8am debate to find two unmanned television cameras in the studio and some makeshift banners behind presenter Jeremy Maggs.
I was taken aback, not least of all because I was dressed for early–morning radio, banking on no-one but the genial Maggs having to see me. The cameras, I was told, were there to broadcast the show on the newly-launched flagship station, SABC International.
Continue Reading 1 comment March 11th, 2009
One things has become clear – the saga of the SABC board is going to drag on for months, leaving the organisation with uncertain leadership at a time when it is under serious political and financial pressure.
Continue Reading Add comment February 11th, 2009
The SABC now says that it is basing its sharing out of election coverage on the number of Parliamentary seats held by a party, and will not therefore be covering the manifesto launch of the new party, Cope. They can’t be saying this with a straight face.
Continue Reading Add comment January 23rd, 2009
The SABC should take a look at one of the key recommendations made by the Sunday Times Review Panel: the idea of a Public Editor.
Continue Reading January 18th, 2009
Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Communications is trying to fix the mess-up it made with the SABC board, but could just as easily make things worse.
Continue Reading Add comment July 8th, 2008
Something has to be done to break the current SABC logjam, but I am not sure the proposed new law giving the government power to get rid of the board is the right way to go about it.
Continue Reading 1 comment July 5th, 2008
It is one of those “Thank goodness for the media� weeks. Or at least thank goodness for some of the media. Radio 702, for example, has been exemplary on the power blackouts.
Continue Reading Add comment April 17th, 2008
Government funding for the SABC could be a boon to public broadcasting. Or it could be a total disaster, depending on how it is done.
Continue Reading Add comment April 17th, 2008
Does the prospect of direct government funding for the SABC bode well for broadcasting? It is an important question.
Continue Reading Add comment January 10th, 2008
My Business Day column of today: SABC boss Dali Mpofu called me a “rightwing conservative�. Last time we had a public disagreement he called me an “ultra-rightwinger�. Let me spell out a few things about myself, so you can judge.
Continue Reading 3 comments September 12th, 2007
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
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)
