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
SABC chief executive Dali Mpofu said in the middle of last year’s SABC “blacklist� saga that “heads would roll� if an independent inquiry found that there had been wrongdoing.
Continue Reading Add comment January 31st, 2007
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 4 comments 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 2 comments 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 2 comments 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 Add comment August 5th, 2006
You can get a sneak preview of Radio 702 on FM. It’s running on a trial phase on 94.7. Try it and see the difference.
Continue Reading Add comment July 18th, 2006
The SABC controversy rolls on. CEO Dali Mpofu has appointed an independent inquiry to look into whether there has been a ban on certain political commentars. A group of regular media commentators are circulating a letter saying they would not comment on SABC until it is clear that there is no “blacklist” of them or their colleagues.
Continue Reading Add comment June 25th, 2006
eTV’s Marcel Golding has been hopping around the continent buying TV and radio stations.
Continue Reading 3 comments April 3rd, 2006
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)
