an analysis of the above list a number of different trends emerge, but I cannot focus here on all of them. While there is a variety of newspapers, the majority in English, they are geared towards different readerships. Some tabloids target niche markets, for example those interested in sex and scandal, as reflected, for instance, in the Sun. But although there are many newspapers there are very few owners. A point worth noting is that, according to Harber (2009) the growth of the Daily Sun suggests that the reading public is widening. The Daily Sun is the country’s biggest newspaper, aimed at black, working class people, offering local news and gossip, and focusing on the everyday lives and struggles of people rather than on intellectual debate. While the Daily Sun is the most widely read daily newspaper in the country, Harber said, daily papers aimed at an intellectual market, on the other hand, do not survive, and he provided the example of the attempt by the Weekly Mail in 1990 to launch a daily, the Daily Mail. This paper could not sustain itself and lack of funding meant that it met its demise less than two months after launching. ThisDay, a national intellectual daily to compete with The Star lasted a year, from October 2003 to October 2004, running up debts of up to R14 million (www.bizcommunity.com/article/196/90/4987). The problem was that neither was able to capture a sufficiently large advertising market or to reach a broad enough audience. The Weekender followed the same pattern as the Daily Mail and ThisDay when it shut down in November 2009. Business Day/Financial Mail (BDFM) launched the Weekender in March 2007. It serviced an intellectual readership, and at its second birthday in March 2009, according to the All Media and Products survey (AMPs) of 2009, the paper showed a significant following of 71 000 readers per issue. However, by November 2009 the management of BDFM closed the paper because of financial constraints. Again, it was a case of not enough advertising and not enough sales. In the meantime, at the lower end of the market the tabloid Daily Sun – launched by Media 24 in 2003 – sold 508 000 copies daily in March 2004, when it was not yet one year old (Harber 2009), and the AMPs survey showed growth from 1.4 million readers in 2003 to 3.4 million by 2005 (AMPs 2009).
A further trend, evidenced by the last point, is that newspaper readership’s decline has been arrested, according to the South African Advertising Research Foundation (Business Day: 1 April 2010). Newspaper sales stabilised, according to the research, and the number of South Africans reading newspapers had increased to 15.324 million, compared with the figure of 14.5 produced by Media Club South Africa in March 2010 cited earlier in this chapter. A fifth trend to be gleaned from the above listing of newspapers is that there is a concentration of ownership by four main players: Avusa, Independent Newspaper Group, Caxton and Media 24. This concentration cannot be a good thing. We need more media, we need a diverse media, and we need media where all voices, from all classes, races and genders are heard – but does this concentration translate into an unprogressive hegemony by big capital? There are far too many issues that are conflated in a discussion of media freedom in South Africa. According to the ANC, in a discussion document for its September 2010 NGC, ‘Free, independent and pluralistic media can only be achieved through not only many media products but by the diversity of ownership and control of media’ (ANC 2010). This is a curious statement, given that the ANC wishes to exercise political control of the media via a media appeals tribunal. It could be claimed that the ruling party’s argument for diversity and transformation is a spurious one, that it is self-serving and a disguise for its more insidious intentions of controlling the free flow of information and criticism. Readers of newspapers in fact have pointed to arguments for diversity as a ‘guise’ to mask the ANC’s efforts to control and limit the role of the media. The extract below from a letter to The Times shows how one reader responded.
It is an open secret that the ANC realises that its inevitable decline in power and control of the country has arrived, now the only option it has is to close access to information. It is not by coincidence that the Protection of Information Bill and the media appeals tribunal are being proposed simultaneously (The Times: 16 August 2010).
Is this concentration of ownership an unprogressive hegemony?
Four big companies own the lion’s share of the commercial print media. This concentration of ownership does not translate into four views in the media, as is sometimes implied by the ANC. I will argue that this assumption reflects reductionist logic and is a simplistic and inaccurate answer to the question of the concentration of ownership. The ruling party uses the concentration of media ownership to try to limit the free space of the media. The stranglehold of big media companies has provided a platform for the government to initiate laws and policies under the guise of development, transformation, protection of privacy and state security, which threaten to close the discursive spaces for open criticism germane to developing a democratic culture and society.
There are different ways of looking at what ‘diversity’ means in relation to concentration of ownership. In response to the long-held belief that ownership and control of commercial media translate into determination of content, Thabo Leshilo, the veteran journalist, then columnist at The Times and public editor at Avusa Media, argued: ‘The idea that such concentration of ownership is a threat to democracy is far-fetched and can only succeed in inflaming passions’ (Sunday Times: 8 November 2009). He pointed out that the big four did not form a news cartel. ‘They all compete fiercely for market share, even to the point of wanting to kill one another’s titles’ he argued. Leshilo was responding to the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA), a section 21 company set up by the government in the new democracy to investigate media ownership and lack of diversity. The stated aims of the MDDA were to give adequate space to women, children and people with disabilities, and for the self-regulatory mechanism for newspapers to be aligned with legislation. Leshilo explained that in South Africa there was little correlation between shareholders and the stories that appeared in papers, radio or television. Nic Dawes, editor of the Mail & Guardian, made the same point: ‘Editors I know and respect would resign if given instructions by management, advertising and shareholders on what news content should be. In all major SA newsrooms, at least those that I know of, they keep a strict Chinese wall between advertising and editorial’ (cited in Daily Maverick: 2 October 2010).
Leshilo wrote: ‘What shareholders care about is the return on their investment. They do not scrutinise papers to check if they do a good job on covering women or people with disabilities, for example’ (Sunday Times: 8 November 2009). In South Africa, he further expounded, shareholders appoint a board, which appoints management, which then appoints editors. While Leshilo conceded that papers could do a better job of covering marginalised communities, women and children, it was not for a government agency to be policing newspapers or the news. He added that some methods proposed at the MDDA meeting were hugely problematic:
They betrayed a veiled desire by representatives of government, state organs and the ruling alliance to impose their own set of values on society and determine what is acceptable to publish. Their suggestion to resuscitate debate on the ANC’s ill-conceived idea of subjecting independent media, privately funded media to a state media tribunal or some other government agency is a dead-giveaway of their intentions (Sunday Times: 8 November 2009).
In theoretical terms, what Leshilo was describing was the unprogressive hegemony of the ANC and the attempted closure of media spaces. A government agency, wanting more diversity to sympathetically reflect the concerns of neglected rural people, blacks, women, children and people with disabilities, is deployed as a disguise for more political control of the media. This constitutes an unprogressive hegemony in disguise as openness, which would ironically limit and hinder free speech and freedom of expression – hallmarks of what is required to sustain democracy – even more than the so-called concentration of ownership. Attesting to this view would be the following point made by Mondli Makhanya en passant in an interview conducted in 2008: ‘Cyril Ramaphosa has greeted me a few times as we’ve passed each other by on the escalator, not once has he called me in for a chat, nor has he visited me in my office … ’. Yet Ramaphosa is one of the owners of his newspaper. While the area of ownership and media concentration is not the focus of my argument, I have raised it here to show that there are different ways of looking at diversity. In particular, the argument for a direct relationship,