Expert voices in South African mass media during the COVID-19 pandemic

CSR communication can be built through two-way exchanges and collaboration with various parties. CSR program information is centralized in the target elite, and there is no communication down to the small units in society, which results in distorted information. The research aims to explore the collaboration model between local mass media and oil and gas companies in communicating CSR to stakeholders. This research used a descriptive qualitative approach with the Yin model case study strategy. Data was collected through interviews with 25 informants consisting of representatives of companies, government, mass media, NGOs implementing programs, and beneficiaries of CSR programs. The research results showed that collaboration between local mass media and companies leads to three patterns: collaborate, involve, and inform. The mechanism for implementing these three patterns, the local mass media in constructing CSR messages focuses on three key sentences: contribution, a form of corporate concern, and a form of good neighbor. The research results also concluded that collaboration between mass media companies and oil and gas companies affected mass media's independence in helping communicate CSR programs to the public. Collaboration fosters self-sufficiency from local mass media networks that voluntarily communicate CSR to the broader public. The relationship between local mass media and companies creates a take-and-give atmosphere where companies and the public try to reach a consensus and collaboration.

SUMMARY On February 2, 1990 the media emergency regulations were rescinded by the state president, mr. F.W. de Klerk. This has lead to the idea in some quarters that the media in South Africa are now totally free. Contrary to this belief the author shows that at the start of 1991 a plethora of restrictions are still being placed on the media in South Africa. These restrictions are indicative of National Party media policy that has been formulated since 1948. In view of this, the general objections of the African National Congress (ANC) with regards to the present media system in South Africa are spelt out from a media policy perspective. The merits of these objections are evaluated, after which the Manoim-debate concerning future policy formulation is briefly dealt with. This debate was mainly conducted in the print media in 1990. The possible lessons that a future independent black press could learn from the demise of the Daily Mail are set out. To conclude, the idea is put forward that the media in South Africa should immediately start to agitate for positive media policy stipulations (a broad media policy framework). Some of the media policy issues that governments of the future will have to address, are also identified.

(1981). Ideology/Culture/Hegemony and Mass Media in South Africa: A Literature Survey. Critical Arts: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 1-25.

This study seeks to understand the pressure from both advertisers and the Bangladesh government on the local mass media between March 2020 and December 2021 concurrent with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, this study aims to explore whether the local mass media compromised more with advertisers amid the COVID recession to earn advertising-based revenue and whether the Bangladesh government mounted more pressure on the press during the period as well as to analyze the influence of the aforementioned factors on newsrooms. To guide this work, this study employs the Market Theory of News Production (McManus, 1994), the Authoritarian Theory of Mass Communication (Siebert et al.,1956), and the Social Responsibility Theory of the Press (Peterson, 1956) for collecting and analyzing data. Twenty Bangladeshi media owners, editors, and journalists have been interviewed in this qualitative study to obtain answers to three research questions based on aforesaid theories. Their in-depth interviews have been thematically analyzed using deductive approaches guided by theories and inductive approaches guided by emergent responses as well. The findings reveal that the local media had a 50% decline in advertising revenue and a 70% fall in circulation revenue, which forced them to undertake cost-cutting measures like firing journalists and suspending their salaries for months. The Bangladeshi mass media also compromised more with the advertisers to sell advertisements amid the COVID recession for their survival. Another major challenge that the local media faced was pressure from the government. The critics were arrested, harassed, and intimidated. These two negative forces had corresponding adverse impacts on the newsrooms. As a result, the press could not perform as per its potential to grow public awareness amid the COVID pandemic and as a watchdog of the government’s coronavirus mitigation programs.

Purpose The research is aimed at studying the peculiarities of local press development in the digital era, analyzing the structure of the Russian local press market and modeling potential development paths of the local press. Design/methodology/approach The research was conducted in five stages. At the first stage, a corpus of texts from the local newspapers was created using the continuous sampling method. At the second stage, the key focuses of the newspapers were identified by the content analysis of the news texts. The third stage involved a benchmarking analysis of the findings and identification of advantages and disadvantages of the local press. Local newspaper’s efficiency criteria and recommendations for transformation of the Russian local mass media in the digital era were developed at the fourth and fifth stages, respectively. The practical value of the study is that it can be used in the development of a new concept of regional media in order to preserve the cultural and national characteristics of the local press. The empiric material is comprised of 68 issues of the local newspapers for the period of 2019–2020 (local newspapers of the Rostov Oblast, Krasnodar Krai, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Lipetsk Oblast and Kemerovo Oblast). Findings The features of the Russian media market are described in the article. The local newspapers from various regions of the Russian Federation are analyzed to identify the critical development challenges in the digital era. The vulnerabilities of the local mass media are identified based on the content analysis of the Tselinskiy Region newspaper, and the recommendations for transformation of the local Russian mass media in the digital era are provided.KeywordsLocal newspaperMedia discourseSocial mediaNeighborhoodsMass media digitalizationLocal press and printed mediaJEL ClassificationR2,Z130

Marketing of breastmilk substitutes during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACTThis article explores media representation of a strike at Lonmin Platinum Mine in Marikana in August 2012, in which the police gunned down 34 miners. Data was collected from randomly selected articles from South African English-language print media. My main argument is that the South African print media provided coverage of the strike that privileged mining interests and generally ignored the concerns and voices of the miners. Using a combination of decolonial and neo-Marxist critical political economy of the media theoretical approaches, I suggest the media in South Africa operates in a global ‘colonial matrix of power’ that (re)produce dominant discourses and ideologies that favour elite interests. The article concludes with some remarks on the need for media in South Africa to adopt a different ethical and normative framework that gives voice to silenced and marginalised voices.

The purpose of this review is to assess academic research on the manner in which the media in South Africa portrayed the events leading up to, and including, those of May and June 2008. The review found that whilst the evidence is convincing that the print media have been xenophobic during this period, this does not necessarily imply that the print media was complicit in the xenophobic events of 2008. Further evidence-based research is needed on how the print media influences attitudes and perceptions in South Africa. Such research should scrutinize news media production and the context within which this occurs in order to provide a more informed view as to why the print media have been xenophobic for more than a decade.

News media in South Africa is assumed to be unbiased and objective in their reporting of the news. Indeed, editors are required to uphold an objective and balanced view with no favour to external political or corporate interests. This assumption of objectivity is tested on a large scale by computationally analysing 30 000 articles published by five media houses: News24, SABC, EWN, ENCA, and IOL. Using topic modelling, 38 topics are extracted from the corpus, and sentiment is computed for each topic. The study highlights various cases of both over and under-reporting by media houses on particular topics. We also identify various tonality biases by media houses.

The paper deals with the analysis of the environmental agenda setting in local mass media, social media and emerging communication gaps. The theoretical and methodological basis for the study of environmental communication gaps is the theory of agenda setting and the factor model of mass communication by G. Maletzke, who takes into account the "pressure" of the mediator and various social and psychological characteristics of the subjects. The aim of the study is to analyze communication gaps in environmental agenda in mass media and social media in the Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk regions. The study applies a set of methods, namely comparative analysis, document analysis with the elements of content analysis, and a survey. Communication gap is understood as a state of ineffective communication, accompanied by interference and barriers, misinterpretations, and one-way communication. The study is based on 4701 environmental media texts from 16 mass media sources and 7 VK social communities in Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk regions for the period 2019-2023. The respondents are 305 people aged between 18 and 30 as the most active users of modern information technologies who receive information online and represent the largest group of the population consuming information from digital media. The analysis of environmental media coverage reveals the following gaps: thematic gaps that manifest in the thematic asymmetry of the information narrative; psycholinguistic as a predominance of negative headlines; political and organizational gaps expressing the uneven representation of the interests of environmental communication participants in the information agenda; reputation gaps as a lack of trust in information sources among the population; and behavioral gaps as a low involvement in solving environmental problems. The presence of communication gaps leads to insufficient interaction between participants in the communication process in solving environmental problems and its low efficiency.

The mass media can play a crucial role in election campaigns because it can influence people's points of view of a candidate, including how they responded to women candidates. This paper aims to analyze how the local media portrayed women candidates in the Local Executive Election (Pilkada) 2018 and the factors that drive it. Unlike most previous studies, which focused on women in legislative candidacy and analyzed the national mass media, this study focuses on women's candidacy in the local executive election by observing the local mass media. The author believes that the differences in the electoral system between the legislative election and the local executive one and the differences of the media scop will produce different findings. Using the explanatory sequential mixed method, the author combined the quantitative method followed up with the qualitative one to interpret this study's data. The author took a sample of 140 pieces of news from local mass media during March-23 June 2018, which was chosen by a non-probability sampling method with a quota technique. This study did not reveal any biased coverage toward women candidates due to four factors: the type of election that women participate in; the social-political capital of women candidates; the condition that women's active political participation is not a novelty; and the alignment of media to the more extensive political agenda. Therefore, it can be concluded that the neutrality of the media does not necessarily cause unbiased coverage, yet by the logic of the media, which makes the media are not passive conduits.

Misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and/or fake news have gained attention for good and bad in South Africa, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. The research-based and non-research-based interventions to tackle misinformation have also been slowly gaining traction, particularly through fact checkers, fake news reporting systems such as those by real411, research on automated systems to detect fake news online using machine learning, sentiment analysis of fake news, tagging of fake news data, and so on. Nevertheless, the spread of misinformation and/or fake news still represents a serious threat and challenge to social media platform owners, citizens, lawmakers, governments, and businesses alike. We hypothesized that the awareness, engagement, influence, and impact levels of misinformation on citizens, politicians, journalists, and lawmakers are relatively low, especially in South Africa. However, no sufficient research has been done in this area to understand engagements, awareness, and reporting of fake news online. This research uses open-source intelligence and selected machine learning techniques to analyse publicly collected social media data to monitor and measure the awareness and engagements of fake news in South Africa over a period of 30 days. The research further identifies key drivers of spreading or reporting misinformation online. We conclude that misinformation engagements on social media in South Africa are active, but only in affluent regions and influenced by mobile device users, who are mostly male. The study recommends further research that may support raising misinformation awareness and positive engagements on social media.

The article aims to understand the process through which scientific experts gain and maintain remarkable media visibility. It has been analysed a corpus of 213,875 articles published by the eight most important Italian newspapers across the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. By exploring this process along the different phases of the management of the emergency in Italy, it was observed that some scientific experts achieve high media visibility-and sometimes notwithstanding their low academic reputation-thus becoming a sort of "media star". Scientific literature about the relationship between experts and media is considerable, nonetheless we found a lack of theoretical models able to analyse under which conditions experts are able to enter and to remain prominent in the media sphere. A Media Experts Evolutionary Model (MEEM) is proposed in order to analyze the main conditions under which experts can acquire visibility and how they can "survive" in media arena. We proceeded by analysing visibility of experts during SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and considering both their individual credentials previously acquired and the media environment processes of selection; MEEM acts hence as a combination of these two levels. Regarding the credentials, we accounted for i) institutional role/position, ii) previous media visibility, and iii) matches between scientific credentials and media competence. In our analysis, we collected evidence that high visibility in newspapers can be seen as evolutionary in the sense that some profiles-i.e. a particular configuration of credentials-are more adapt to specific media environments.

Since the end of apartheid, national and local governments in South Africa have been involved in the commercialisation and marketisation of a wide range of public services. This article examines the responses of the mainstream media to these neo-liberal initiatives, looking specifically at English-language newspapers and their coverage of water, electricity and waste management services. We explore the extent to which the print media can be deemed to be in favour of privatisation as well as the more subtle, discursive ways in which it covers these issues. We argue that these corporate media outlets in South Africa generate and perpetuate a neo-liberal discourse on privatisation, but that this dialogue is neither omnipotent nor monolithic. Nevertheless, it is exactly this façade of objectivity which gives neo-liberalism its hegemony. By appearing to give equal space to different points of view there is a perception of balance in the press that obscures the more subtle, opinionmaking discourses that generate neo-liberal biases. We conclude with a brief discussion of what might be done to counter this neo-liberal authority.

COVID-19 is a novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SAR–CoV-2) spread from person to person through infected air droplets of saliva and discharged from sneezes and coughs. This study seeks to contribute to knowledge and understanding of how coronavirus outbreaks could be addressed by examining communication and media strategies used by governments and public health institutions in South Africa and Ghana during the coronavirus pandemic. The study systematically analysed published data on COVID-19 in South Africa and Ghana from 2019 to 2020 to identify recurring themes to discuss issues regarding communication strategies in response to the outbreak. This study found various inadequacies and challenges to communication and media strategies to address the spread of COVID-19. The governments and public health institutions in South Africa and Ghana used multiple mass media channels to communicate different messages and create awareness about COVID-19. This article recommends the improvement of communication and media engagements between governments and health stakeholders in South Africa and Ghana to increase public awareness of the risks, threats and outcomes of COVID-19. The media in South Africa and Ghana must conduct fact finding of information about coronavirus from official sources in government and health institutions before dissemination to the public to minimise fake news, misinformation and disinformation. The governments and health institutions must not rely solely on traditional mass media strategies but also integrate indigenous communication strategies for engagements to address the challenges of mass media to increase public awareness about COVID-19 in South Africa and Ghana.