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.
David Bollier -
We’ve known all along that Facebook was more of a commercial machine committed to corporate advertisers than a benign platform that respects individual users. The problem was, most of our friends and acquaintances were already on Facebook. The site has lots of cool features, and there was no serious alternative to migrate to.
But, as Facebook's appetite for maximum profits kicked in, we knew there would eventually be a reckoning. The uprising began when Facebook instituted a new set of...
Jane Duncan -
In May, the Deputy Minister of Home Affairs, Malusi Gigaba, announced that he was pursuing the possibility of a complete ban on pornography distributed over the Internet and on cell phones.
This emerged after Gigaba met with the Cape Town-based Justice Alliance of South Africa (JASA) to discuss a Bill they had drafted in support of such a ban, as well as a legal opinion on the constitutionality of the Bill. The head of another Cape Town-based organisation, Errol Naidoo, of the Family...
Glenn Ashton -
Africa has been catapulted into the electronic age over the past decade and a half by an almost incomprehensibly swift growth in telecommunications technology driven primarily by a massive rollout of cell phones and wireless technology throughout the continent.
While few can deny the economic benefits that this growth has brought to a continent historically hobbled by a patchy telecommunications infrastructure, the physical risks of this explosive growth on the health of the people of...
Jane Duncan -
The recent controversy about an e.tv story featuring two criminals who threatened robbery and violence during the 2010 World Cup, has raised once again the controversial issue of whether journalists should have a right to protect their confidential sources of information.
The journalists responsible for the story have been issued with subpoenas in terms of Section 205 of the Criminal Procedures Act. For many years, media freedom advocates have argued for an amendment to this provision...
Jane Duncan -
Debates about the controversial Public Services Broadcasting Bill have focussed on proposed changes to the South African Broadcasting Corporation's (SABC) funding model, as well as attempts by the Department of Communications to exercise undue control over the SABC and the community media sector, ostensibly to ensure that the sector meets developmental state objectives. To this end, the Department requires the SABC to '[support] rural development, particularly in the areas of agriculture, job...
Jane Duncan -
"All shall call." This phrase was popularised by Pallo Jordan in the mid 1990's, and became a catchphrase of telecommunications transformation in South Africa. It echoed the idea espoused by Jordan at the Plenipotentiary meeting of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) that access to telecommunications was a right, not a privilege.
A snap survey of telecommunications usage by residents of Grahamstown points to just how foreign these concepts are today.
It also points to...
