After attending a few sessions at the Highway Africa conference in Grahamstown last week, I struggled to find an answer to the question: How will convergence make our democracy better? Discussion about digital media and convergence tends to focus on the medium rather than the message; on the technology of communication rather than the content. […]
Robert Brand
Robert Brand teaches media law, ethics and economics journalism at Rhodes University. Before joining academia, he worked as a journalist for the Pretoria News, the Star and Bloomberg News.
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Let’s dump our ‘foreign, frigid and feelingless’ Bill of Rights
Dali Mpofu, the CEO and “editor-in-chief” of the SABC, has lashed out at members of the South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) for “pretending to be converted to foreign, frigid and feelingless freedoms”. The issue that provoked Mpofu’s outrage was the Sunday Times‘s reliance on the right to freedom of expression in defence of its […]
Posted inGeneral, Media, News/Politics
Curiouser and curiouser …
Curious report just out on Reuters: Johannesburg (Reuters) — South Africa has denied it blamed Britain for Zimbabwe’s isolation in a report prepared for a regional summit earlier this month. The office of President Thabo Mbeki denied that the government produced a report on Zimbabwe critical of Britain before Mbeki briefed leaders of the Southern […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
From the Prophet Muhammad to Manto Tshabalala-Msimang: some thoughts on press freedom
Eighteen months ago, Judge Mohammed Jajbhay ruled that the Prophet Muhammad’s right to privacy outweighed the right to freedom of expression, and interdicted the Sunday Times from publishing cartoons of the prophet. This week, the same judge delivered a ringing endorsement of media freedom, made a decisive statement against censorship, and rejected the health minister’s […]
Posted inBusiness, Media, News/Politics, Tech
Let’s not be narrow-minded about broadband
The government’s plan to create a state-controlled company, Infraco, to drive down telecommunication costs and improve broadband internet access has, predictably, come under fire from free marketers. What we need, writes Duncan McLeod in the Financial Mail, is less state interference in the telecommunications sector, not more (read McLeod’s column). This strikes me as a […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
What the Guardian’s journalism tells us about the media … and Thabo Mbeki
“…what this episode tells us is that respected foreign correspondents such as McGreal are willing to believe almost anything about our president.”