The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
The media play an important role as information mediators in today's world, occupying an important space where public debates about national and international issues take place. SACSIS seeks to understand the role and the impact of the mainstream media in achieving public interest journalism.
Glenn Ashton -
The media will always be a contested space. Some insist there should be no controls over the amorphous beast that is the media; others insist we cannot have a free-for-all. In South Africa we presently walk an uneasy middle road between a free press, a powerful public broadcaster as well as corporate and political oligopolies, which wish to place self-serving limits on our freedom of expression.
The sleazy British phone hacking scandal within the extensive Murdoch media empire poses a...
Democracy Now -
Dr. Michio Kaku, a Japanese American theoretical physicist and bestselling author, joins Amy Goodman of Democracy Now to talk about his new book, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Change Daily Life by 2100. Kaku outlines a future in which cars will be driven by computers, the aging process will be frozen, and the internet will be surfed in contact lenses.
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AMY GOODMAN: We continue with Dr. Michio Kaku. His latest book is called Physics of the Future: How Science Will Change...
Jane Duncan -
Is there a place in the South African media for a government newspaper? Cabinet spokesperson and head of the Government Communications and Information System (GCIS), Jimmy Manyi, clearly thinks so.
Plans are afoot for GCIS’ existing publication, Vukuzenzele, to be transformed into a tabloid newspaper. If the proposal receives a cabinet stamp of approval then the paper will appear monthly initially, and then fortnightly.
In motivating for the newspaper, Manyi has argued that the...
Jane Duncan -
The Press Council of South Africa has just completed a series of public hearings into the adequacy of its systems. The hearings were organised in response to the African National Congress’s (ANC) arguments that the Council is biased towards the media, necessitating the establishment of a statutory Media Appeals Tribunal (MAT).
The ANC also continues to berate the print media for a lack of transformation, and has argued for a Parliamentary hearing on the matter. Much of their ire has...
Burcu Bakioglu and Peter Ludlow -
On January 14, 2011, Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was forced from office, and by some accounts he thereby became the first political casualty of the age of Wikileaks and social media. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter provided communication outlets for many of Tunisia's unemployed youth. Tunisians posted amateur videos of police repression, firing squads and riots on their personal profiles from their homes and cybercafes. Relatives living abroad were then...
SACSIS -
In Spring 2010, The South African Civil Society information Service (SACSIS) co-hosted a roundtable discussion with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) South Africa Office. The meeting sought to get a better understanding of how the South African media reports on the economy.
One of the key reasons behind hosting the event was that as a country and indeed as the world, we live in precarious times.
Given the financial crisis of 2008 and the global recession that followed, 30 million...
