Thinking aloud/allowed: pursuing the public interest in radio debate

Abstract

This article examines the controversy that erupted in 2006 when the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) was accused of banning certain commentators. The ‘blacklisting’ saga surfaced differences in ideas and practices of publicness among the contenders in the controversy and revealed that notions of the public, public accountability and the public interest were contested. The research describes independent newsroom practices conducted in terms of journalistic ethics and professional ideologies, and shows that journalists assume a powerful role in defining publics and calling them into being, as well as in orchestrating their participation in public deliberation. This is a professional responsibility that is recognised and defended. However, the practices associated with that responsibility and the power to orchestrate the debate in particular ways are not critically engaged within the profession. Just as the debate illuminates the concept of publicness imported into journalistic practice, it also illuminates concepts imported into SABC institutional practice which are rooted in a long lineage of national democratic struggle. In the controversy, the two concepts chafed against each other, propounded in each case by protagonists embedded in their respective lineages. The controversy was thus more than simply a struggle for political control; it was a contest about the meaning of democratic citizenship itself, rooted in differing but intersecting political‐intellectual logics.