Browsing by Author "Mgibisa, Mbuyisi"

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    Media Voices and Power: A decolonial analysis of black voices in the post-apartheid South African media landscape using City Press newspaper as an analytical focus
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-03) Mgibisa, Mbuyisi; Menon, Dilip; Daniels, Glenda
    This study conducts a decolonial analysis of black voices in the post-apartheid South African media landscape using City Press newspaper as an analytical focus. For the purposes of this study, I have analysed four case studies linked to the mediation and meditation of black voices in the media and public sphere. First, this study explores the subjection of black voices inside the newsroom using the black-oriented newspaper, City Press, as an example. It assesses the structure of whiteness in that newspaper and interrogate whether it provided its black journalists with a room to write from the standpoint of “black perspective”. The second theme is an exploration and personal account of my lived experience in the typical South African neoliberal newsroom and an attempt to bring theory in order to figure out my lived experience. Third, this thesis focuses on forms of gendered and racialised forms of subjection posed by the silencing of voices of black women journalists in the South African mainstream media, including social media. And the fourth theme looks at the importance and significance of voice or speech in doing politics in the post-apartheid South Africa and interrogates how the Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) has deployed its “radical black voice” through the concept of Black rage. The study utilises decolonial theory and Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness philosophy as a lens as it seeks to investigate how essentialised, racialised, politicised, gendered and lived are black voices in post 1994 South Africa media landscape and public sphere. This study, then, involves the critical analysis of four themes, all of which are integrally related. The main argument advanced in this thesis is that black voices continue to be subjected through the concept and function of coloniality. For this reason, the study not only historizes black voices as producers, users and custodians of knowledge but also situates their lived experiences. This study finds that even in the face of debilitating coloniality in our everyday lives, black voices persist through those politicised, gendered, racialised and lived negative forms of invisibility and marginalisation and think and speak from the perspective of blackness. Therefore, this thesis posits that black voices are a communicative plane on which blackness performs and articulate itself, for itself. Moreover, this study is a form of epistemic protest against systematic and systemic silencing of black voices and an attempt to counter efforts of rendering black people, in particular black women, speechless. The transdisciplinary methodological approach deployed here is, first and foremost, embedded in the theoretical framework and various methods and concepts will be operationalised to bring to light the complex and complicated nature of how black voices are mediated in the post-apartheid South African media landscape and public sphere. The interview method, which comprises a reflective commentary, and autoethnography are important components of this study. Additionally, the empirical findings through interview material, newspaper articles and tweeter feeds have been examined through discourse analysis and through the prism of the conceptual analytical tools deployed here.
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    The media wars and their discourses in the South African print media
    (2017) Mgibisa, Mbuyisi
    In post-colonial, post-apartheid South Africa, “media wars”1 appear to have become a strong feature. Traditionally, the news media rarely report about other media. Media wars seem to manifest themselves more when news publications subject each other to critical scrutiny. Recent media wars between newspaper companies and editors have highlighted the agonistic pluralist nature of the South African print media which is facing persistent and complex disruptions. This research asserts that a notable feature of these media fights is that they are linked to the battle to gain market share in the South Africa print media market stranglehold by big media organisations. They are often couched in ideological discourses which are constitutive of editors and media owners speaking out publicly about issues internal to the media in order to carry the freight of public attention. The foci of this study will be two-fold: Firstly, it seeks to investigate whether these media wars are related to the broader issues of transformation in the South African print media. Secondly, the study seeks to unravel how some of the country’s leading news publications represent their competitors using editorial platforms and will investigate the editorial motivations behind certain representations. Despite the growing interest in media wars, South Africa is still underrepresented due to a lack of literature published in the field. The main rationale behind the study is to show how the media’s ‘independence’ from political parties plays itself out in ideological discourses found in the tensions between newspaper companies and editors in the period between 2010 and 2015. Two examples or case studies of media fights will be critically examined in this study and a qualitative discourse analysis will be undertaken in order explore the ways in which the media war texts spoke to or problematised the main theories employed in this study, namely: Critical Political Economy (CPE) of the media and Michel Foucault’s material post-structuralism blended with Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘media field’. Keywords: media wars, agonistic media space, market share, ideological discourses, transformation, representations.