Measuring media diversity in South Africa: a model for measuring media diversity and the audience centred approach

2021 ◽  
pp. 23-41
Author(s):  
Julie Reid ◽  
Vanessa Malila
Keyword(s):  
2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
pp. 611-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Duncan

Using a critical political economy perspective, this article focusses on the migration from analogue to Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) in South Africa. Drawing on relevant international examples, it explores whether South Africa’s regulator is realising one of the major promises of the DTT transition, namely, to create more media diversity in the television sector. It analyses decisions taken by the communications regulator in allocating the digital multiplexes and whether these are contributing to broadening the public sphere. Sadly, in spite of the promise that the transition held, there are signs of it leading to reduced diversity and an upward redistribution of spectrum to upper-income brackets. Commercial broadcasting has become even more dominant than it was in the analogue space, which has intensified what Robert Horwitz has called a ‘commercialising juggernaut’ in television. These developments risk turning the country’s policy of three tiers of broadcasting – already under strain – into a policy in name only. Working class audiences that rely on public service television especially are being dispossessed of spectrum, depriving them of the resources necessary to speak to and be heard by mass audiences. The article asks why the DTT transition has come to this, and in attempting to answer this question, it critiques dominant theories of regulatory behaviour (including critical ones) as being overly structuralist in approach and not taking sufficient account of the agency needed to bring about a decommodified television system where the power to make symbolic resources is not determined by wealth.


1972 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 27-38
Author(s):  
J. Hers

In South Africa the modern outlook towards time may be said to have started in 1948. Both the two major observatories, The Royal Observatory in Cape Town and the Union Observatory (now known as the Republic Observatory) in Johannesburg had, of course, been involved in the astronomical determination of time almost from their inception, and the Johannesburg Observatory has been responsible for the official time of South Africa since 1908. However the pendulum clocks then in use could not be relied on to provide an accuracy better than about 1/10 second, which was of the same order as that of the astronomical observations. It is doubtful if much use was made of even this limited accuracy outside the two observatories, and although there may – occasionally have been a demand for more accurate time, it was certainly not voiced.


Author(s):  
Alex Johnson ◽  
Amanda Hitchins

Abstract This article summarizes a series of trips sponsored by People to People, a professional exchange program. The trips described in this report were led by the first author of this article and include trips to South Africa, Russia, Vietnam and Cambodia, and Israel. Each of these trips included delegations of 25 to 50 speech-language pathologists and audiologists who participated in professional visits to learn of the health, education, and social conditions in each country. Additionally, opportunities to meet with communication disorders professionals, students, and persons with speech, language, or hearing disabilities were included. People to People, partnered with the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), provides a meaningful and interesting way to learn and travel with colleagues.


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