Time and time again I hear it said that the quality of journalism is deteriorating in South Africa. Frankly this is rubbish — what is declining is the quality of the audience. The source of this criticism is a society that has become a carcass of fat and bone with very little meat.
The sad reality, if you ask any online news publisher about their most popular stories, is that “man fucks donkey” comes up quite high and yet the audience have the audacity to point fingers at the journalists and media houses for giving them what they want.
So, while established newspapers kept relatively flat circulation figures for most of the year, Die Son, a pillar of modern day journalism, passed the point where it was selling half a million copies a day. Let’s consider what this means for quality journalism.
Firstly, the traditional papers that focused on quality are not growing because there is clearly not a growing interest in quality information from the reader pool, or they are getting it elsewhere. Given the lack of widespread internet access one could assume the possible sources of this alternative high-quality journalism are … the SABC News or e.tv, or the radio.
Secondly, journalism doesn’t pay well, especially when your publication isn’t growing its readership. It used to be the case that journalists did what they do partly out of a sense of public service, but it’s pretty hard to get inspired about the public when no one respects what you do anymore. The insult: armchair journalists sitting in their living-rooms watching Cheaters like it’s the news while blathering on about how unreliable the news media is.
Thirdly, in order to cut costs many media houses rely heavily on wire services and the end result is a news landscape that lacks diversity. There are a few papers that still invest in investigative journalism, but they are far from popular in the grander scheme of things.
Now, some may argue very convincingly that the reason the audience has become so apolitical and slightly intellectually retarded is really the fault of the media in the first place. Actually I think it’s laziness and a sense of entitlement — it takes work to remain politically interested when you are no longer forced to by a dire and unacceptable situation like apartheid. With democracy and capitalism come uniformity and a lulling consumerist mediocrity, where entertainment rather than the realisation of loftier political ideals becomes the primary objective of society.
The fact remains that no matter how much we blame the American entertainment industry for turning us into drones, there is nothing stopping people from taking the decision to start thinking again — except that it might take a little effort. Lamenting the quality of the media doesn’t help — rather put your money where your mouth is and support publications that do care about quality. Who knows, things might change?
Vince, I agree with you on parts of this post. Though in it’s entirety I think that your article has some holes in it.
Firstly, I agree that quality hasn’t necessarily dropped in terms of production. Some papers/magazines maintain quality at every cost but aren’t being read as often.
Secondly, audiences are lazy but it’s not just a simple choice I don’t think.
Let’s use blogging as an example. It is a very idealistic concept in essence and many people have tried to blog. But when shit gets real and times get tough many (if not most) “bloggers” give up. This is the point where many media production houses are at.
Shit has become tough and the market for investigative journalism is niche. It’s tough picking for an audience and a newspaper like MG has the market very captured in this respect.
Then you get to a point where investigative journalism becomes sensationalised, almost “soap-operaesque” in order to maintain readership. This is a lose lose situation.
I really do feel that a combination of media and market demand are to blame.
One way to look at it is this: The market consumes what the media produces. If the media takes a hard line on serious journalism that is well researched all the time then the market, in theory, would consume it.
However, on your point of Apartheid being over, maybe the market needs to recover and gather themselves for new battles and concerns. Apartheid and the political ramifications of it have not left us and are written about almost daily in the news. It gets to be too much.
“Journalism doesn’t pay much” – what is that? Some sort of justification for lazy journalism? Rubbish. Journalists at big corporations earn enough to live comfortably and create job satisfaction.
All in all I think that this is very much a chicken and egg situation, production vs consumption and the line that the media needs to draw in order to overcome this.
Widespread internet access, Pah! Newspapers dont sell anymore because the morons that are the South African public would rather read YOU and HEAT and feel intellectually stimulated after seeing the latest picture of Britneys crotch. Lest we forget the utter reality drivel of Idols, Big Brother and that Survivor crap that M-net irradiates us with every night.
So Spencer, is that the publics fault or the media’s fault for producing such drivel???
@Nic Thanks for your comments but I don’t agree that the audience buys what the media dishes up. We’ve both been through Cultural Studies 101 and know there is overwhelming evidence that the audience plays an active role in what it consumes.
The pay much point goes in two directions: 1 – the field is no longer as attractive, from a career perspective. This affects the quality of university enrollments and what tends to happen, as we see in the European universities, is that people studying journalism are really there to write about shoes and handbags. 2 – Don’t underestimate the bitterness of people who feel like they’re slipping out of the middle class.
“Then you get to a point where investigative journalism becomes sensationalised, almost “soap-operaesque” in order to maintain readership. This is a lose lose situation.” – This is exactly my point, why are the conditions such that good information has to be sensationalised, and does it even matter anymore whether there is a thread of truth beneath the sensation? I have my doubts and most post-modern media theorists will agree that the truth behind quality is a mirage.
Nic, its the nature of the beastie. If the media is going to dishup reams of drivel its going to be lapped up. You said it yourself above :
“production vs consumption and the line that the media needs to draw in order to overcome this.”
Hence, its the Media’s fault and the media needs to understand where we as consumers are in our current social and cultural space. We are not as sophisticated and liberal as we like to think we are. This is not Japan or Germany.
I’m not against using the media for entertainment but the media needs to ensure a balance between educating and titillating.
Forget about the quality of journalism? That’s where you got it all wrong!
If you write or produce quality, them I will consume quality. However, start producing rubbish and then you will see. First, you subscribers will start to decreases.
One Business Report subscriber said: if the Koni Meidia bought or took over Johncom – he would de-subscribe because what would be in Business Report would no longer be news – in fact quality journalism.
What do you say then?
My point is that the group who do care about quality news is not growing, it is shrinking so you should actually read past the first line of the post to get its meaning.
I don’t hold out terribly much hope for quality journalism. The market for it is so small, because the size of the educated market is tiny, relatively speaking. (And let’s face it, how many BComm graduates have any interest in anything besides making money.) Whenever this question comes up, I think of Denis Beckett’s Sidelines, which published a wide range of articles, some by well-known journalists, others by members of the public who happened to be able to write. It was the sort of journal I both wanted to read, and for which I wanted to write. For years, those nice Germans at the Friedrich NaumannStiftung paid to keep it going. The moment it had to stand on its own two feet and find advertising revenue, it folded.
There must be a balance of sensational and objective reporting.
Vincent,
Your argument is not different from a representative of KFC blaming the consumers for the lack of proper nutrition in their chicken.
ITS JUST WRONG.
Actually, Vincent’s comment about Die Son’s circulation sums it all up. Readers are more interested in titillation, whether it be pictures of naked women or stories about dead tokoloshes. Compare the circulation figures of a weekend tabloid to either the M&G or Weekender and you’ll get the definitive answer. I suppose this could also be construed as an issue of demographics.
@khosi – Actually it’s like KFC saying they fry their chicken because consumers don’t like or buy boiled chicken. The the consumers turn around and say hey, look at these corporates, they are so bad at boiling chicken it comes out fried.
So in essence, Vincent, you are saying that media owners should provide the public with things that are good for them – the media equivalent of vegetables (no mention of Manto) rather than chips?
I don’t have an answer for that one, partly because the only way to ensure it would be to enforce it through legislation, which is not what we want at all.
Let’s bring this issue, which ultimately boils down to one of popularity, down to the level of Thoughtleader itself.
Based on the number of reads enjoyed by most blog entries here, it would clearly make sense for most bloggers here to write about Ronald Suresh Roberts – because that’s what people want to read about.
I agree with Vincent to a point, and one of the major contributing factors is a global problem – the lazy audience. A lazy audience finds Big Brother easier to consume than political commentary, but is that a trend arising out of Westernisation and some unnamed contemporary condition – or is it is a result of overexposure, even news fatigue?
Sarah that is an interesting question and this is why we have the idea of a public broadcaster, even though in SA the commercial channel has to air more local content than SABC, that’s a different story though.
In a way the concept of a public newspaper – i.e. funded by the public but independent of government – would be interesting. I doubt it would have any readers because who would trust that there is no complicity. Newspapers are now reaching a point where their commercial interests could be contradictory to the public interest – and the public interest is not to serve up more entertainment but to provide good information based on which people can make political and civil decisions. If the commercial imperative of a newspaper is to make as much money as it can then surely it makes much more sense to launch something like Die Son than a paper that will flounder with low circulation but lots of serious content.
In fact we need to stop talking about content in terms of quality – quality refers to something different. When we say quality these days what we actually mean is content that is serious or important, as opposed to superficial or trivial.
So there is a visible decline in the amount of quality journalism in SA and this is attributed to journalists following the market in writing what an increasingly bovine rabble will pay to read?
I think the pattern you are observing, if it is real, may be uniquely South African. And there isn’t any obvious reason for such a trend to be uniquely South African. So I worry a little about the hypotheses you seem to be forming.
Western countries generally have the same list of complaints about the philistinism of popular culture. The reality TV programmes, many of which originate in the UK, are a case in point.
To my knowledge the quality papers have not, however, generally suffered a spectacular decline in the UK. Difficult times perhaps, but the market remains fairly vibrant and diverse. And top journalists remain influential and credible members of society.
People in many first world countries also haven’t strayed from “loftier political ideals,” nor have they been “lulled” into “consumerist mediocrity” by “democracy and capitalism”. (What a delightful world view!)
These countries have indeed rarely in recent history pursued particularly “lofty” political ideals at all. They have generally also for many years been bastions of iniquitous democracy and capitalism.
So what is it about SA?
I simply don’t think there has ever been much of a market for quality journalism in SA.
It is conceivable that the wafer-thin SA market for an offering similar to the UK broadsheet papers has largely moved online.
Certainly the mainstream SA papers – in the Cape, Jhb and Durban – are not, and I don’t think have ever (heroic individual columnists aside), been of a general calibre remotely approaching a Times, Guardian, Telegraph or Independent. They have generally always been pretty thin gruel.
If I spend any time in SA now (as I rarely do) it is simply easiest to catch up on the news on line.
The M&G is an ok read but the rest of the SA press is a bit of a waste of time.
The quality stuff is accessible on the internet. And the target market for the quality stuff generally have internet access. Is it not perhaps as simple as that?
I’m not sure that its fair to say that its rubbish that the quality of journalism is declining. Having been a journo, I know that newsrooms are being flooded with people of colour who don’t have English as a first language. Added to that, they don’t have that many senior journos to teach them either (because as Vincent correctly says, the job does not pay well and the good journos are moving off to find money elsewhere). The net result is that ALL junior journos, white or not, aren’t mentored properly. Most journos will tell you you only really learn the job while in a newsroom, which means junior journos are suffering and those who aren’t first language English speakers have an added hurdle to get over.
To think that my first retainer of 32 hours a month paid more than my gross salary as a journo… the move into using my writing talents and understanding of the media elsewhere was a no brainer…
How does one define ‘quality’ journalism? Personally, I think that the products need to evolve, and require signiifcant change – otherwise they become boring. And how many people actually have around R 50-00 a week to buy a batch of ‘quality newspapers’?
I write this from the perspective of an ordinary South African who just happens to love anything well-written (well-written in my opinion, of course). I know precious little about cultural theory or the economics and dynamics of journalism.
Over the years I’ve narrowed my newspaper reading down to the Mail Guardian, my consistent source of quality, interesting and relevant journalism. As a Capetonian I should be reading the Cape Times and the Cape Argus but I rarely do so. On occasion I buy both newspapers and I’m always left with a vague sense of dissatisfaction. There just doesn’t seem to be enough meat in it. Most articles seem written by rote and it’s been a very long time since I read something that piqued my interest or inspired me in some way. Also, as Cape-based newspapers I don’t think that either publication is representative of the daily lives of many people living here. I seldom find anything that reflects my own experience.
While in no way carrying the flag for the tabloids (for I loathe them with a passion) one of the reasons they’re so successful, I think, is that they often write about what people can relate to, happenings around them, whatthey see and experience every day. It would be wonderful if the tabloids would write these articles in good english or afrikaans and with a more responsible attitude but that would be asking for too much I suppose.
As for magazines…a magazine that has earned my respect is the South African edition of Psychologies. What a thoughtful and entertaining read. I’ve recently also started reading Maverick – what a pleasure. And I also include the Thought Leader in my list of must reads.
My point is that, as with most things, the blame does not lie squarely with either the media or the audience. The media should present quality, well-researched and relevant work even if they feel that the majority of the audience is not responding and the audience should stretch themselves occasionally and read more widely and discriminately. Encouraging a culture of reading and learning in children would be a good place to start. Enquiring child readers grow into enquiring adult readers.