Newsroom Culture and Journalistic Practice at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC): An Ethnographic study

Abstract

This research sets out to examine newsroom culture and journalism practice at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). The primary objective is to understand the factors inside the SABC newsroom that impact the construction of news stories and current affairs productions. Anchored on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of the habitus, doxa, and capital, together with Habermas’ concept of the Public Sphere, this thesis describes the newsroom culture of the SABC between 2016 and 2021 based on everyday work experiences and perspectives of news workers, managers at the broadcaster and available documents. As a secondary objective, the study explores how SABC newscasts and current affairs programming mediate news. Specifically, the content analysis of News and Current Affairs products assesses how the SABC mediated pluralist politics during the 2016 local government elections from the perspective of normative public sphere principles and examines how routines, practices, and professional values broadly impacted the broadcaster’s coverage, particularly the contested issue of ‘land’. The study is essentially a qualitative ethnography of the SABC newsrooms, although a multi-method approach is adopted to arrive at a more encompassing view of the journalistic culture of News and Current Affairs construction at the broadcaster. The 2016 period and after are interesting because these are also moments in time when the SABC newsroom was characterised by widely reported tension and editorial turmoil. The findings reveal some of the embedded structural systems in the SABC’s newsrooms, such as the role of the management hierarchy and the institutional norms, shared professional values, and routines that journalists use to achieve functional ends for the broadcaster. Furthermore, the study identifies a gap in the general scholarship of the SABC. For example, fewer studies have attempted to account for the culture and journalistic practice inside SABC newsrooms, all of which have impacted directly on the general operations of the broadcaster and execution of its PSB mandate.