I’m the spindoctor, yeah baby — Snuki

You know, you’d think that the news director of the country’s public broadcaster would bristle at accusations that he’s just a government spin doctor. That he’d protest that yes, he used to be the communications man for a government department, but what journalist hasn’t stooped to PR to pay the rent on occasion, and anyway, you can’t assume someone would have any obligations to past employers.

Not Snuki Zikalala. He revels in it. The Times has the story: No news is good news, says Comrade Snuki.

The SABC would not have broadcast stories about Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s behaviour during her hospital treatment, or on her conviction for theft for stealing a watch from an unconscious patient — because the public broadcaster only carries stories that aid the country’s development.

“We are guided by the constitution not to incite violence or hatred in our reporting, said Snuki Zikalala, the SABC’s chief of news yesterday.

“Publishing such a story is disrespectful.”

You know, all this wouldn’t be such a problem, if people could realistically be expected to ignore it, and switch to a more wholesome news station. If the SABC wasn’t the dominant player in a small government-protected cartel. Market forces don’t act very robustly when the government only permits a single free-to-air licence holder to compete with the SABC. When the owners of any device that can receive TV signals must pay mandatory TV licence fees which go to the SABC. When new competition cannot arise without an invitation from the Minister of Communications, and then is likely to be required by law to charge fees from their viewers, or even agree in their licence conditions not to carry news at all.

I suppose people could switch to non-TV media. But is this a realistic expectation? The fact is that there’s no robust competition against the SABC in the huge middle- and lower-income demographic, so the government’s propaganda outlet is virtually guaranteed to find a huge audience. And while their income might be lower, their votes count just the same.

(Hat tip: Sarah Britten, who recently started a Facebook group on the subject of media freedom in South Africa.)