Having it both ways: balancing market and political interests at a South African daily newspaper

Critical Arts, July, 2008 by Herman Wasserman, Gabriel J. Botma

Abstract

The process of democratic transition in South Africa has brought many changes to the national political economic context within which media companies operate. These changes have also brought challenges for South African media companies to reposition themselves ideologically, with their political-economic interests in mind. Coinciding with these local challenges to the South African media's ideological positioning and economic strategising was the re-entry of the South African media into the global arena. Heightened levels of competition and the accelerated influx of foreign content have increased the imperative for local media groups to adjust their strategies. Local media companies have implemented several strategies, including restructuring, globalisation and commercialisation, in response to these challenges. The implications of these macro-shifts can also be noticed on the level of specific individual media outlets. This article examines such a repositioning at the Western Cape-based Afrikaans daily newspaper Die Burger. A mouthpiece of the Nationalist government during the apartheid era, Die Burger had to fundamentally shift its ideological positioning to fall into step with the values of a newly democratic society. This was done by distancing itself from its former political position, and instead embracing a supposedly apolitical market ideology. The shift towards a market-led perspective can be seen most clearly in a management strategy known as 'synergy', a practice raising questions regarding orthodox journalistic ideals such as editorial independence, and democratic ideals such as equal access to the mediated public sphere. This article aims to establish the manifestation, nature and influence of synergy at Die Burger and its implications from the perspective of critical political economy.

Keywords: Afrikaans; apartheid; arts festivals; Die Burger; political economy; synergy.

Introduction

In a recent study of contemporary Estonian media, Harro-Loit & Saks (2006:312) lament the diminution of the border that separates journalism from advertising. While acknowledging that the commercialisation of journalism is increasingly taking place around the world as part of the spread of consumer culture that views journalism as primarily a commodity, they also point to the particular vulnerability of media in an environment

   that has changed dramatically from totalitarian political
   censorship exercised across half a century to a media context which
   arguably enshrines the independence of journalists ... The
   counterbalance to economic pressure should be journalism's ideology
   of professional independence, but in transitional societies the
   journalistic community and its professional culture may be too weak
   to resist such pressures. Furthermore, media concentration and a
   modest job market make the ideology of professional independence
   extremely vulnerable since journalists tend to be less loyal to
   their professional ideals than to the ideology of their employer.

Although direct comparisons between European and African countries remain problematic in many ways, the commercial pressures on the mediated public sphere in Estonia as a transitional country do raise interesting points of similarity with post-apartheid South Africa. Although the latter is much larger (a population of 47.4 million versus 1.36 million), the South African media market is still fragmented according to language and race, which creates several smaller distinct markets. The mainstream print media sector (excluding the recent spate of popular tabloid papers aimed predominantly at a black or coloured working class) is especially small in terms of the population as a whole, focused as it is on a literate and well-to-do elite.

South Africa is also a transitional democracy, emerging only recently from decades of apartheid rule and centuries of colonial repression. The shift from an oppressive environment to one where journalists self-regulate within an industry experiencing escalated commercial pressures as a result of global competition, has created similar dilemmas for the South African mediated public sphere. This pressure has manifested acutely in the Afrikaans media sector, which had been forced to undergo major shifts in its political orientation after the demise of apartheid--a period during which the sector was aligned with the ruling regime.

This article will discuss one of the strategies that the Afrikaans media sector has used to reposition itself ideologically and economically, through a particular focus on one of the major Afrikaans newspapers, Die Burger. This repositioning, while successful from a commercial point of view, has far-reaching implications for the role that the Afrikaans media sector has come to play in the post-apartheid public sphere. Through this discussion the article hopes to provide an illustration--from the post-apartheid South African context--of some of the issues that media in other transitional societies in a globalised world might also be facing.