ETD Collection

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/104


Please note: Digitised content is made available at the best possible quality range, taking into consideration file size and the condition of the original item. These restrictions may sometimes affect the quality of the final published item. For queries regarding content of ETD collection please contact IR specialists by email : IR specialists or Tel : 011 717 4652 / 1954

Follow the link below for important information about Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

Library Guide about ETD

Browse

Subject: search.filters.subject.Radio broadcasting--South Africa

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Community Radio: a critical analysis of the relationship between funding sources, programming and developmental role
    (2020) Sithole, Enoch
    The normative function of community radio is to, inter alia, play a developmental role in the community it serves. Playing a developmental role is among the key distinctions between community radio and its public and commercial counterparts. The medium is expected to respond to the needs of the community it serves, rather than the demands of its funders or any other interests. However, the challenge to be financially sustainable has forced community radio to gravitate towards responding to the needs of funding sources, be they commercial, in the form of advertising and sponsorship, NGO donors or government institutions. This has led to several accusations being levelled against the sector: community radio is operating in the same space as its public and commercial counterparts; its programming and editorial content are influenced by funding sources; it’s commercial radio in disguise; and most importantly, it no longer plays its community development role. This study critical analysis the relationship between funding sources, programming and editorial content and the developmental role of community radio. The research reveals a sector in serious financial distress. In some cases, at least, funding sources play a critical role in programming and editorial content choices of community radio stations. This has, indeed, posed serious challenges to the stations’ ability to pursue their developmental role. The research revealed the need for urgent interventions to return community radio to its normative role
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Community radio's compliance to programming: a case study on the selection of content for Alex FM's current affairs talk show
    (2018) Baloyi, Makungu
    Community radio is radio that serves a specific community. In South Africa, Community radio licenses are issued on two grounds, to either serve a geographic community or a community of interest. In both these instances the mandate is to serve the community and provide content that is relevant to the community. Aleaz (2010) highlight that Community radio is supposed to empower the marginalised communities and give them a voice. One of the ways to empower these communities and give them a voice is through programming and providing content that represent them and maximising their participation in programming. This research looked at how content was selected for Alex FM’s Current affairs talk show. It explored how content is gathered and selected with the aim of establishing whether communities are involved in the process. It also sought to investigate the factors that contribute to content selection and whether there is any link to community participation and development. The research is located within the tenets of public sphere and the democratic participatory theory. These theories offered an understanding of the role community radio plays in community in development. Democratic participatory theory values inclusion of citizen’s voices in public deliberations. This was corresponded with the public sphere theory’s version of Nancy Fraser’s of the sub-altern public spheres. The theory highlighted that there is a need to have multiple public spheres to allow the marginalized who cannot participate in Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere to still have a voice. Qualitative research methodology was used to explore the content selection process at Alex FM for their current affairs show. Together with participant observations and pilot listening the researcher used these methods to collect data. The findings revealed that factors that contribute to the selection of content are news values. Topicality and relevance being the main ones captured in this study. The findings also show that content gathering process at Alex FM; maximises community participation. Subsequently, this guides the station (or producers of the talk show) to structure content of the show in line with the needs of the communities
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Masculinity in Muslim media: a case study of Radio Islam
    (2018) Dadi Patel, Aaisha
    This project examines the ways in which Radio Islam, a South African community radio station, constructs masculinity in the South African Indian Muslim community. This community is its largest audience. The radio station is strongly influenced by the ideologies and rulings of the Jamiatul Ulama, an ideological body whose teachings stem from Indo-Pak interpretations of Islam and with whom much of the South African Indian Muslim community align themselves. The conflation of this culture and religion in this context results in patriarchal and misogynistic teachings being repeated by this body without much questioning, resulting in the common upliftment of men and confinement of women in the community to certain roles and spaces only. Through the examination and discourse analysis of broadcasted content on Radio Islam in three categories that have many gendered dynamics to them - hijab, marriage, and Ramadan - this study aims to unpack the way in which masculinity is constructed, and the extents to which these constructions then facilitate the entrenchment of patriarchy in the broader South African Muslim community.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Africanising community radio broadcasting: the case of Vukani Community Radio (VCR) in South Africa
    (2017) Tyali, Siyasanga Mhlangabezi
    Decolonisation and Africanisation of spaces emerging from administrative and settler colonialism have been suggested as forms of challenging colonial legacies that are still largely present in the Global South and particularly within the African continent. Mainly, this has also been the case in recent South African discourses that have called for the decolonisation and ‘transformation’ of key areas in the country to build a decolonised African country of the future. This thesis, therefore, deals with the subject of the community radio broadcasting sector that is operating during South Africa’s ‘postcolonial’ era, and the steps undertaken by this sector in Africanising itself. Starting from the conviction that the media has a historical role in shaping and communicating cultures as well as identities of the colonised and ‘formerly’ colonised, the thesis posits that the community radio sector is one of the vital arenas that can be used to understand the continuities and discontinuities of colonial cultures in media institutions. Thus, to comprehend and establish the state of Africanisation within the community radio sector of the country, the study investigated and analysed the case of Vukani Community Radio (VCR); a community radio station that is easily one of the oldest community orientated broadcasters in South Africa. Furthermore, to challenge the idea of colonised and neo-colonised media spaces, this thesis was grounded on an understanding of the complexities of Africanisation as a decolonising project in a media institution that is operating in the post-settler-colonial administration of this country. Adopting a case study approach, this study attempted to understand the urgency of a broadcast media platform in asserting the cultures and identities of ‘previously’ colonised Africans on the medium's airwaves. To make sense of the conceptual challenges surrounding the study, the thesis has drawn on decolonial discourses, including the theory of Afrocentricity, the coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, the coloniality of being and the decolonial turn. The adoption of these theories by the study, therefore, also demonstrates a conscious delinking of this study from the traditional theories of media and cultural studies that have habitually underpinned the South African canon. Moreover, this study has adopted the use of critical decolonised methodologies approach in the pursuit of answers about the extent of Africanisation of the media institution. The decolonised approach of the adopted method lay in revealing the colonial excesses that have underpinned research methodologies as well as an ‘auto-critique’ of these excesses in the context of this study. The data analysed to arrive at the findings of this study included several macro and micro policy documents, a content analysis of three (3) categories of community radio programmes [Talk Radio, African Cultural Lifestyle & News Programming] that totalled 270 hours of community radio content. The study also relied on several semi structured interviews with various internal and external stakeholders that make up the station's key constituencies. In the analysis of evidence that would uncover the extent of the Africanisation of the community radio station, the findings of the thesis revealed several yet overlapping thematic areas that suggest pathways towards the Africanisation of the media institution. These, among others, included the use of this media institution as an African public sphere, its embracing of the philosophy of Ubuntu, its role in the decolonisation of African memory and its approaches towards ethnicity and Africanity within the broadcasting area. These themes emanating from the analysed data of the study also illustrate how this media institution is operating as a pocket of resistance against colonial, neo-colonial and imperialistic media cultures. In addition to these thematic areas, the findings of this study also demonstrate that when only media policy documents are adopted, this can lead to ambiguities in the pursuit of Africanisation as decolonisation. The study however also demonstrates that the urgency of the community radio station in catering for the surrounding constituency can potentially demonstrate an eventual Africanisation of the airwaves. Finally, this study concludes that the Africanisation of the airwaves is demonstrable at Vukani Community Radio (VCR) but its permanent enforcement is dependent on the vigilance of the stations constituencies and how they define and enforce the role of their media institution.