MICHAEL MARKOVITZ: How public media in SA can be sustained

For the past five years I have been a nonexecutive director of SA’s public broadcaster, the SABC. Coincidentally, I flew to New York on my last day as a director and arrived in the US as a former director, with my term expiring somewhere over the Atlantic. These are therefore my own views — I do not speak on the SABC’s behalf.

I want to sketch out the governance of public media in SA, outline the SABC’s 2021 policy proposals on the future funding of public media, and finally focus on the SA National Editors’ Forum’s (Sanef's) recent recommendation that SABC News be incorporated into any future bargaining code.

Public media governance

Without trust in a public media entity it is very difficult to win public support for increased funding. Proposals for increasing public media funding should ideally be based on strong governance structures and operational plus editorial independence being guaranteed in law.

However, when the former board was appointed in 2017 we inherited a mistrusted, beleaguered, nearly insolvent SABC — one of many public entities that had fallen prey to the kleptocratic state capture project of the Jacob Zuma presidency. Our board appointment followed damning public inquiries into political interference and corruption, with civil society organisations litigating against captured ministers and the SABC itself.

Serendipitously, on the day after our appointment a high court held that the minister was precluded from interfering with the board’s activities, and that the board was exclusively in charge of the SABC, clearly upholding the public broadcaster’s unique constitutional role. The judgment was a powerful shield protecting the board’s independence, and consequently the editorial independence of SABC News. 

Unfortunately, the judgment also escalated tensions, and SABC remained a bitterly contested space between those who see independent public media as a pillar of constitutional democracy, those who seek to control it for political ends, and others who want to capture it for nefarious purposes. This contestation continued throughout our term, with the outgoing SABC chairperson disclosing to the Sunday Times that his independent stance led to death threats to him and his family.

In this highly contested environment the board tried to rebuild public trust and developed new editorial policies, which were widely praised. According to local watchdog Media Monitoring Africa, SABC News also provided fair, balanced and comprehensive coverage of two countrywide elections in 2019 and 2021.

Commercial dependence

The SABC is the one of the most commercially dependent public broadcasters in the world, with commercial revenue making up 80% of its total revenue base. Public financing comprises the balance, with TV licence fees at 16% and government grants at 3% of total revenue. R815m in licence fees was collected in 2021, but less than one-fifth of households are paying. Public media is indeed “an increasingly endangered species”, as described in a recent UN Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organisation (Unesco) policy brief. Not only is public financing insufficient to fund the SABC’s public mandate, but the TV licence fee is seen as an archaic concept in a multi-device world.

The SABC board spearheaded proposals for the sustainability of public media as part of a recent government review of broadcasting legislation. These proposals were based on the notion that public media is fundamentally a public good and followed similar thinking to the German federal constitutional court, which held in 2018 that their household levy was constitutionally valid as it was “specifically for the financing of public service programming that is fundamental to democracy”.

The SABC’s main proposals were:

• Increased direct funding from government for public interest programming, subject to the SABC maintaining editorial control;
• Replacing the broken TV licence fee system with a redefined, device-independent, public media levy, applying to all households, with an exemption for the indigent. In my view once a statutory levy exists, independent of government appropriations, it makes more sense to fix the levy than to scrap it. In the UK, Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee described Boris Johnson’s mission to scrap the BBC licence fee as “pure political vandalism”, and I can’t describe it much better than that;
• Monopoly pay-TV operator MultiChoice — and in my view any streaming services that achieve scale — should be required by law to part collect the public media levy from subscribers on behalf of the public broadcaster. SABC would continue to collect the balance through improved online offerings. MultiChoice rejected this proposal, saying it was ill-founded and would be globally unprecedented “to shift revenue collection to the private sector on the part of public service broadcasters”. But one needs to look no further than those EU states introducing a range of investment obligations for private streaming platforms based on the principle that platforms must support local and public interest programming. The proposal to extend collection obligations to pay-TV and streaming platforms using their payment mechanisms is soft in comparison.

Government’s policy review process has not reached finality, and draft legislation is yet be introduced in parliament. Courtney Radsch, author of Making Big Tech Pay for the News they Use, is correct that introducing new measures in any country “is not just about political will, but also about institutional design, legitimacy, and trust”. We have considerable work to do to ensure these principles are part of any new funding framework.

Competition law and sustainability

SA’s Competition Commission is currently finalising a market inquiry into competition in the digital economy, and a group of publishers made extensive proposals, including the submission of draft legislation — essentially a “made for SA” version of the Australian Bargaining Code for big tech and the news media. This code has led to over $140m being transferred from big tech to the Australian news media sector. However, the commission decided that this did not fall within the scope of its current inquiry and recommended that it be addressed “through a separate process, including potentially a more focused market inquiry”.

Sanef’s position paper, published in September, sets out a range of principles and recommendations for sustaining independent media, including how to improve on the pioneering Australian Bargaining Code. Significantly for the SABC, Sanef found that “due consideration should be given to the fact that SABC News is the second largest online news platform in SA” and “also unusually reliant on commercial revenue … meaning it suffers from the same challenges faced by other news publishers in the commercial sector”.

Sanef concluded that on “the basis of precedent (citing the Australian experience), the SABC’s commercial profile and its public-interest mandate, there is strong cause for SABC News to be included in any sustainability intervention”. There is no indication yet when the commission will start its “more focused market inquiry”, but hopefully it will be as soon as possible.

In summary, there should be multiple initiatives to fund public media, including a redefined public media levy, enforced collection of the levy by pay-TV and streaming companies, more direct funding from government, and ensuring SABC News is part of any future bargaining code intervention between big tech and the news media in SA. 

I look forward to a more expeditious approach by government and regulators in dealing with these initiatives.

• Markovitz is head of the Gordon Institute of Business Science’s Media Leadership Think Tank, situated in the University of Pretoria. This is an edited version of a presentation he made to the Saving Journalism II conference at Columbia University, New York, in October.