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?
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Glenn Ashton, SACSIS columnist, argued that the nature of the media is really the polarized nature of the media. It doesn't seem to matter much, for example, that the debate over climate denialism is over, it still seems to crop up in newspapers.
Ashton also added that the business media had not picked up on the issue of climate adaptation and how it can be used to kick start local economies.
The debate on power generation always focuses on big things such as nuclear energy and big...
Mohamed Motala, executive director of the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (CASE) asked, "what is it that civil society has to do to make journalists uncomfortable enough to report on an issue - including climate change?"
Motala was concerned that the media does not pay enough attention to cross cutting issues such as poverty, class, race, gender and inequality.
Motala made these remarks at a roundtable discussion, which sought to ascertain how the South African media is...
Mark Allix who is a correspondent at Business Day and also a SACSIS trustee recognized the high levels of pollution that the Medupi and Kusile power plants would emit, as well as the fact that South Africa, per capita, is one of the biggest polluters in the world with SASOL and Eskom being largely to blame, but wondered how to reconcile the contradictions between economic dynamism and pollution as a journalist in the media, especially one writing for a business newspaper.
Allix made these...
Brendan Boyle, editor of the East London-based Daily Dispatch newspaper argued that we need to make the story of climate change about "me" in order to make it newsworthy for newspapers to pick up on.
Boyle contended that climate change is the next global catastrophe.
He compared current coverage of climate change to early coverage of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa when aids denialism predominated.
Boyle argued that from a media perspective, he would not want...
Sue Blaine, Environment and Development Editor at the Business Day, South Africa's premier business newspaper, argued that climate change as an issue has arrived at a time when fundamental global changes are taking place. The Western way of looking at things has been the dominant one for a long time, but that's changing, she argued, and climate change fits into this evolving discourse.
Similar to Brendan Boyle, editor of the Daily Dispatch, who believed that the media should not take...
Prof. Herman Wasserman, Deputy Head of Rhodes University's School of Journalism and Media Studies argued that the South African media's coverage of climate change is not quite commensurate with the scale and impact of the crisis.
He highlighted three weaknesses in the media's reporting on climate change:
1) The frequency of the coverage.
2) The prominence of the coverage.
3) The tone of the coverage.
Prof. Wasserman highlighted these issues at a roundtable discussion,...
