Jam or cheese? The challenges of a national broadcaster in a multilingual context

Abstract

In contrast to commercial broadcasters, national broadcasters are partly subsidised by taxpayers’ money and therefore have a mandate to serve their particular society within the context of the current political system. In democratic societies these mandates typically have to balance out the following challenges:

• A limited number of available television channels and radio stations

• Equity in terms of audience home language/language variety

• Audience preferences and values

• Audience ratings and the subsequent advertising income.

The paper demonstrates that a public broadcaster can promote diversity and multilingualism AND be commercially successful. The multilingual soap operas produced for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) will be the case in point. Moreover, the case studies will show how commercially successful multilingual soap operas can give new status to marginalised languages.

Keywords:

• Broadcasting
• multilingual
• SABC
• soap operas
• television