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.
Jane Duncan -
The ruling African National Congress (ANC) did what most people suspected at its recent National General Council (NGC) meeting, and endorsed a Parliamentary investigation into the feasibility of setting up a statutory Media Appeals Tribunal (MAT). However the resolution that was passed by the NGC softened many of the more extreme positions taken by some ANC members in the recent past.
The dust had hardly settled on the NGC meeting, when South African Communist Party (SACP) General Secretary...
Jane Duncan -
On Wednesday the 4th of August, Sunday Times reporter Mzilikazi wa Afrika was arrested at the offices of the Sunday Times newspaper, in response to a complaint laid by the Premier of Mpumalanga province, David Mabuza. Many aspects of wa Afrika’s arrest have raised troubling questions about the appropriateness of the state’s actions, and have fuelled speculation that political pressure was brought to bear on the police to act against wa Afrika for his activities as a journalist....
Allan Badiner -
In just six years Facebook has crossed the threshold of 500 million users. In the past nine months it has doubled in size and is now the number one most visited Web site in the world, surpassing Google. Facebook’s motto is “Making the world open and connected,” where a lone voice can have a powerful impact, as evidenced this year by one activist’s post on Facebook that sparked a demonstration of 12 million people against the Revolutionary Forces of Columbia (FARC),...
Jane Duncan -
The ruling African National Congress (ANC) has just released a document on the media for its National General Council (NGC) meeting, scheduled for September. The document, entitled 'Media transformation, ownership and diversity', claims to build on a resolution adopted at the ANC's 2007 Polokwane conference, as well as a media policy developed for its 2002 Stellenbosch conference.
The document is bound to be controversial, as it raises once again the possibility of establishing a statutory...
Richard Pithouse -
The African National Congress, perhaps buoyed by a renewed sense of public confidence in the wake of the World Cup, is, again, moving against one of our fundamental democratic freedoms.
Amidst a new flurry of indignation, paranoid and hysterical in equal measure, various representatives of the ANC have made it quite clear that they consider some of the criticisms of the party and its leaders that have appeared in the media to be unacceptable. This is not the first outbreak of this sort of...
Saliem Fakir -
The furore over the Protection of Information Bill and its proposed draconian punishments for disclosing classified state documents belies a long simmering tension between the state and South Africa’s free press.
In the background of the parliamentary process to charge through the Bill sits the ANC’s proposal to establish a media tribunal. The resolution was proposed in Polokwane, supposedly to stop media excesses and abuse. After somewhat of a lull, the idea has been revived...
