Trends in threats that prevent journalists from reporting freely and new draft surveillance legislation are among concerns raised in the Campaign for Free Expression (CFE) report on the State of Free Expression in South Africa 2024.
The report was introduced at the first session of the Media Freedom Festival at the Goethe Institute in Johannesburg in the week of Black Wednesday, raising red flags for South Africa’s famously open press in which politicians and CEOs are as vigorously exposed and critiqued as each other. Clerics and entertainers are not protected, and comment is encouraged.
But there is, as the title of the report emphasises, ‘A Need for Vigilance’. Reflecting especially on journalists’ freedoms during the elections in May this year, it shows how ‘online attacks … were considered a greater threat … than the serious but isolated incidents journalists faced while working in the field’, with the CFE noting this was ‘in line’ with the findings of its previous review.
The Festival was historic this year in that Media Monitoring Africa – which has held a number of events to mark Black Wednesday in previous years – was joined by the Press Council and prominent activists the CFE and the SOS Coalition, as well as the South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF) and the Association of Independent Publishers (AIP) for a series of panel discussions and conversations on ‘Access, Accountability and Integrity in Journalism’.
But there were other historic effects explored through the Festival, as the CFE showed in its report and as panellists examined over the three days.
Freedom of the press is considered central to South Africa’s human rights-based Constitution, which includes it within the Bill of Rights as a response to the jailing, banning and violence against media workers and publications during apartheid. Black Wednesday draws particular reference as it commemorates 19 October 1977 when the regime cracked down on a number of newspapers and editors to deepen its power and narratives
Compiled by Internet and media rights expert Alan Finlay, the CFE’s report comes amid the challenges of fast-moving technologies and financial strain for the media, as well as expanding disinformation and hate speech. It makes the key observation that those issues have ‘important implications for the resilience of a free media … [and] for democracy and freedom of expression’.
CFE director Anton Harber facilitated a discussion about this on 15 October with Dr Ismail Mahomed, a cultural activist, top media attorney Dario Milo of Webber Wentzel and former SABC news chief Phathiswa Magopeni, whose ousting from the public broadcaster in 2022 made international headlines and drew attention to its seeming inability to remain independent of politics.
Their discussion focused – as does the report – on ‘cross-cutting issues of concern’, including SLAPP suits, the decline of probing arts journalism, and, as Magopeni explained, ‘a danger that’s sitting inside newsrooms that we are not paying attention to’.
Freedom of expression is ‘not only about what is happening outside’, she said.
‘One, it’s media owners … the interests of media owners in the content that’s being produced, and it’s been playing out in two stories. It’s geopolitical issues: Russia and Ukraine and Gaza and Israel. That is where you actually get to see where the interests of media owners lie in the editorial decision-making in newsrooms.
‘We need to pay attention to that because these may be the two big stories, [but] what else is happening locally, in the coverage of different stories locally, that gets to be sanctioned by media-owners.’
Magopeni saw this as critically ‘linked to sustainability’.
‘The pressures have meant that there are stories that the newsrooms are going to walk away from because they could jeopardise advertising and sponsorships … In fact, media sustainability is coming up as a huge threat to freedom of expression and media freedom.’
She also raised journalistic independence, saying, ‘we talk a lot about editorial independence which is the domain of editors in the main, [but there are] journalists going around seeking help about what they see as censorship within newsrooms [and] there is no agency or structure in the sector that deals with [that]’.
‘What about the stories that get killed? … Journalists end up taking instructions on what not to report on.’
‘The other part,’ said Magopeni, is the ‘decline of journalistic literacy’.
‘This is linked to a lack of due diligence in newsrooms, a lack of duty, of loyalty and the duty of care in the newsrooms, and it plays out in different spaces because you have entities that expect journalists to have huge followings on social media platforms and part of this following is politicians who they are supposed to report on, and they become friends on social media.
‘How do you report on these people when you are having conversations on social media? Where’s your independence when you have to interrogate the lives of these people, and how they conduct themselves in the spaces where they’re supposed to be serving the public?
‘It’s about how the media conducts itself in the stories that they tell; that they have the due care … the verification that needs to be done, that [their] loyalty is to the citizens and not the people [they’re] reporting on [or] the media house that [they] work for.’
Magopeni raised journalists’ job security as a central issue in this regard.
‘Journalists are scared of challenging editors on issues that they would ordinarily try to raise – unlike what we see during the times of Percy Qoboza … unlike what they did at the time and they ended up in to jail.
The new jail is job security. [Journalists] are protecting their livelihoods by walking away and overlooking things they should be questioning