Jane Duncan

Reconstruct, 8 November 1998

Presently, South Africa’s broadcasting policy is being overhauled to bring it into line with the constitution. A new Broadcasting Bill is before Parliament, which has been developed from a White Paper issued in June. Important objectives have been set for the whole sector, including universal access, diversity, democratisation and nation building. Surely these principles mean that gender equality in broadcasting should at last become a reality, especially given that the policy identifies gender as a crucial component of empowerment?

Possibly, many women may not benefit, in spite of the above principles. This is because the policies are premised largely on economic strategies that increase the role of the private sector and decrease the role of the state in correcting inequalities. In line with the country’s macro-economic framework, commercial services will be expected to attract foreign investment and become internationally competative, the SABC will have to become financially self-sufficient, and the community sector will have to find its own way assisted by modest grants from the government. This is a far cry from proposals being put forward a few years ago, where a statutory Media Development Agency (MDA) was mooted to foster media diversity, and state funding of the SABC as a whole appeared likely.

The problem with premising development on the market is that markets are gendered in complex ways. According to the Development Bank of Southern Africa, 56.4% of women 15 years and older do not earn any income at all. In spite of the government’s commitment to a job creation strategy, jobs are being lost all the time, especially those filled by women as they tend to be ghettoised in ‘uncompetitive’ industries. Debate is raging about whether the government’s pro-globalisation macro-economic choices are the panacea or the cause of these problems. These fears are well founded, in the light of international experiences which suggest that globalisation is driven by the super-exploitation of women. Given that for a range of complex reasons, globalisation decreases women’s access to markets, policies that pin their redress hopes on private sector interventions may be way off beam. Therefore, the proposals around public service and community broadcasting - as supposedly ‘non-commercial’ services - assume particular importance for women.

The Bill will corporatise the SABC and separate its services into two arms, public service and commercial. The former will be governed by a statutory Charter. The commercial arm will declare a portion of its profits to the government, and the Minister may then redirect some of these funds back to the public services. Hence if any ‘state’ funding is forthcoming, it will have been generated by the commercial services in any event, and will depend on their profitability.

This proposal could lead to the opposite effect of the stated intention - namely the protection and promotion of true public service broadcasting - and may result in the gradual withering away of these services. Given the government’s self-imposed fiscal constraints, there is no guarantee that dividends from the commercial arm will find their way back to the public services. Also, according to the White Paper, the commercial arm may be privatised, which will put paid to the cross-subsidisation plans once and for all. The public services are also allowed to carry advertising and accept sponsorship, which traditionally been no-no’s for public broadcasting as they introduce commercial pressures that adversely affect its mandate. In spite of this, there is no hint in the government’s plans of at best abolishing and at worst limiting these forms of funding, which may result in the public arm pushing its commercial activities to the limit to guarantee it a stable funding base.

Radio may suffer the most, and we have an international ‘model’ to attest to this. When New Zealand’s public broadcaster was corporatised and separated into two arms, the internal cross-subsidisation arrangement between the more and less well-off stations was killed off as excess funding had to be declared to the government. As a result, radio became cash-starved, while the advertiser’s medium of choice, television, became fully commercial.

These proposals are not gender-neutral. According to research conducted by the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (CASE), women tend to access radio more that any other at medium. Yet in spite of this, men are heard more frequently than women. The situation improves slightly on television, although black women were found to have the least access to television. Given the fact that so many women would hardly constitute attractive ‘markets’ for advertisers or sponsors, it is not difficult to imagine the male bias continuing if the SABC is restructured for self-sufficiency. Public funding to relieve the SABC of commercial pressures is an imperative for gender redress. In the short term, the SABC’s local content quotas should be enforced to foster the development of gender-sensitive educational, news and current affairs programming.

Given community radio’s local-level bias, we would expect that they would be well-placed to serve womens’ interests better. However, glaring disparities exist even in this sector. A statutory Media Development Agency is needed to overcome these structural inequalities, a challenge that a narrowly-conceived funding agency as proposed in the White Paper may not be equipped to meet. The White Paper’s proposals around encouraging ownership and control of broadcasting services by historically disadvantaged groups are implicitly biased towards men. This is so because access to start-up credit from commercial banks presupposes a level of ‘creditworthiness’ that many women simply do not enjoy given the gendered nature of formal employment: policies of this nature should acknowledge that women and men enter the empowerment arena from different points.

The White Paper also proposes an outcomes-based skills development strategy pegged to the National Qualifications Framework. Given the recent bias in the NQF towards harnessing education for international competitiveness, there are real dangers that it will privilege skills in male-dominated sectors of the economy at the expense of gender-sensitive knowledge. These lacunae could be addressed in broadcasting through the rigorous engendering of qualification standards. Women should be fast-tracked in production, direction and scriptwriting as a necessary but by no means sufficient precondition for engendering local content.

In considering the gender implications of broadcasting policy, it is not enough confine our focus to the representation of women, or even the number of women employed in the sector. Inequalities are structural: they reach deep into workings of the market economy, nationally and globally, and they will not be solved by ‘add women and stir’ policies. Strategic development interventions are needed that are consciously designed to reduce gender inequalities, some of which have been crudely sketched out above.