‘Treating officials with kid gloves?’ An appraisal of government in two South African television news programmes

Abstract

In response to widely reported perceptions of pro-government bias on the part of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), this study applied Appraisal analysis to television news recorded from SABC3 on the one hand, and e-tv, a commercial channel, on the other, in order to explore at least the notion of relative bias. Bias was construed in terms of partiality (evaluative language used) and lack of balance (the range of voices given access to the newscast and the amount of time they are afforded) and three types of discourse were extracted for analysis: lead and closing sentences of news items; instances where voices other than the broadcaster's were attributed (in effect, reported speech); and instances where other voices were given direct access to the newscast. The results revealed a pro-government bias by SABC3 relative to e-tv, more in terms of partiality than balance.