Communication from above and below: Media, Protest and Democracy

ABSTRACT

Since the end of apartheid, there has been a steady rise in community protests in South Africa. Many of these protests – often cumulatively grouped under the rubric of 'service delivery protests' are not only about the delivery of basic services, but equally about the closing down of democratic/institutional space and process when communities try to raise issues related to services and corruption. If protests are a way for the poor and the marginal to let their voices be heard, these protests should be seen as a form of communication from below with the aim of attaining greater social transformation and inclusion for those sections of society who still feel excluded from the democratic public sphere more than two decades after the arrival of formal democracy in South Africa. The coverage of these protests that the mainstream media provides, the way they are framed and the discourses constructed around them, can be considered communication from above. This paper investigates both these perspectives – from above and below – on community protests, through a three-fold methodology: a quantitative content analysis of print media coverage of community protests; qualitative in-depth interviews with journalists; and qualitative interviews with activists who were involved in the protests.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See for instance Alexander (2010, 25) for a reference to some of these debates.

2 A quantitative content analysis was conducted of print media coverage of community protests between 2013 and 2015. International studies have shown that mainstream mass media often subscribe to the protest paradigm, which includes delegitimisation and demonisation, highlighting the negative consequences of protests. Given the significance of the media as sources of collective knowledge and people's perceptions of reality, this paper explores these issues in the local context, exploring how a sample of mainstream South African newspapers portray these protests, and what kind of interpretations and value judgments are offered to frame the conflict.

3 The paper belongs to the company TNA Media owned by the Gupta family, which is close to president Jacob Zuma.

4 An analysis of 25 qualitative in-depth interviews with journalists that reported on community protests was conducted. These interviews were aimed at investigating the factors that influenced journalists’ coverage of protests, the circumstances under which they work, their normative values and their assessment of South African democracy in general. The interviews therefore provide a window through which we begin to make sense of the dominant media narratives of the protests, as they provide ‘first hand’ accounts of the perceptions, experiences, constraints and opportunities that make up the ‘context’ of producing news on community protests. Participants were selected based on a convenience sample, but also drawing on quota sampling methods to allow wide representation from commercial radio and television, as well as daily and weekly papers from various media houses, to represent a range of ownership structures. Transcripts were coded using the NVivo software package and a thematic qualitative analysis was conducted through a process of inductive and deductive coding.

5 An analysis of qualitative interviews with activists who were involved in community protests was conducted. These interviews seek to understand the motivating factors driving protests, the activists’ assessment of South African democracy, their views of the media coverage their organisations have received, the strategies they employ to influence media agendas and alternative media platforms that they use to mobilise support. Inclusion of activists in the interview was based on their involvement in the conflicts under study. In most cases, we attempted to interview activists whose organisations were covered in the media sample that was content-analysed. Depending on saturation and local circumstances, activists and civil society members from additional media outlets were also included, but only those who were involved in some way in the conflicts under study. We aimed at achieving a balance between activists from different types of organisations and that were involved in different ways; Taking care to interview both junior and senior/more experienced activists.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration [grant agreement no 613370]. Project Term: 1 February 2014–31 January 2017.