© Pancho, Le Monde, Paris
I’ve come to make my media culpa
Drawing © Hours, Perols
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The South African
Example
The media regulation and self-regulation mechanisms
in South Africa consist of:
• A press ombudsman and an appeal panel set up in 1997 by journalists and publishers’
associations. The panel is composed of publishers, journalists, and members of the
public, who are in the majority. It is funded by the newspaper publishers association
(www.inc.co.za/online/
ombudsman). Its power is limited to
publishing reprimands and corrections which the ombudsman or the panel consider necessary.
Complaints against the press are lodged by private individuals or institutions first
with the ombudsman, who will try to settle the matter. If this fails, the complaint
becomes a formal one. The complainant can appeal against the ombudsman’s decisions
to the appeal panel. At each stage, discussions between the conflicting parties are
held.
• The Broadcasting Monitoring and Complaints Committee (BMCC), made up of four members
from the legal profession and the media and chaired by a working or retired judge.
The committee reports to the Independent Broadcasting Authority, an audiovisual regulatory
body set up by law in 1993. The law which created the authority provides for rectifications
(broadcast on radio and TV), publication paid for by the guilty party, injunctions,
fines and temporary or permanent suspension of broadcasting licences. The committee
examines violations of the codes of conduct for news and advertising which are part
of the law and also violations of the terms of the licence-holders’ contracts.
• The Advertising Standards Authority, which monitors advertising and complaints
about it.
• The Broadcasting Complaints Commission (BCCSA), set up in 1993 by the National
Broadcasters’ Association, is an independent regulatory body grouping private and
community radio stations, as well as the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC),
the public service media entity. Its powers are limited to publication of its decisions.
It receives complaints from the public about violations of the radio and TV code
of conduct it has drawn up. It has to try mediation before giving its verdict.
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Website of the
month
www.unesco.org/
webworld/webprize/
Cyberculture, art and literature blend successfully
in two new sites. Nirvanet, a creation by a Brussels-based team of international
web designers, is a multicultural, multilingual presentation of cultures and places
around the world through art, music and video. From the University of Chile, a team
of students and professors have set up their own multilingual site dedicated to the
poet Vicente Huidobro, bringing him within everyone’s reach through imaginative design.
These sites have been awarded UNESCO’s top web prizes. Three other sites, on world music,
women’s literature and Mozart, also won honourable mentions. They may all be accessed
from the above address.
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As part of a growing
trend in the developing world, press councils are encouraging responsible journalism
and press freedom
 Since the early 1990s, pluralism and independence have become new watchwords
for media in developing countries. Regimes that had been authoritarian, in some cases
since independence, have genuinely committed themselves to freedom of the press.
Constitutions and laws have been amended, codes of conduct drawn up and press councils
established.
But these developments have not taken place everywhere, and their results have not
always been conclusive. However, a number of countries have managed in the last few
years to create a free press in extremely difficult circumstances and set up a model
self-regulatory structure. One of them is South Africa (see box).
The symbolic date of change was November 9 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down.
In central and eastern Europe, the explosion of press freedom was such that in some
countries journalists had to pick up the job as they went along because there were
not enough professionals to teach them.
An explosion of press freedom
But the shock wave rolled beyond the borders of the
former Warsaw Pact countries. Developing countries in Africa and Asia under one-party
rule underwent a similar transformation, triggering the same kind of media explosion,
albeit in a range of different situations.
The context in Africa is one of civil wars, international conflicts and even genocide,
for which some media, such as the notorious “hate radios”, bear direct and crushing
responsibility. In Rwanda and Burundi, virtually all the media are under government
control. Fighting is still going on in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where
84 journalists have been imprisoned, media outlets have been taken over or shut down,
newspapers burned and their offices looted.
Africa, Asia and Latin America have also seen countless unwarranted libel actions,
censorship, harassment, arrests and killings of journalists. Over the last 10 years,
58 journalists have been murdered in Algeria and 44 in Colombia. Ethiopia has jailed
more journalists than almost any other country in the world.
But this tragic decade also saw encouraging changes. UNESCO helped to point the way forward in 1988 when it produced a new communications
strategy based on independence and pluralism. The collapse of the Soviet bloc deprived
developing countries of a point of reference and backing. Since independence, many
of these countries had adopted the model of the one-party state, which was seen as
the only way to generate the energy needed to tackle economic backwardness.
The 1990 summit of French-speaking states at La Baule, in France, called on the countries
of francophone Africa to introduce more democracy. The English-speaking states of
the Commonwealth, meeting in Harare (Zimbabwe), the following year, followed suit
and resolved to expel countries which did not comply. This was what happened to Nigeria,
Africa’s biggest country, then under military rule.
In May 1991, the Windhoek Declaration, drawn up after a UNESCO seminar and later approved by UNESCO’s Executive Board, said that an “independent, pluralistic and free
press” was vital for “democracy and economic development”. The death knell had sounded
for the notion of the media controlled by a one-party state to promote national development.
Similar declarations were made in respect of every continent by conferences in Alma
Ata (Kazakhstan), Santiago (Chile), Sana’a (Yemen) and Sofia (Bulgaria).
Laws and constitutions were amended in Benin and Mozambique in 1990, Burkina Faso
(1991), Madagascar, Ghana and Kenya (1992), Nigeria (1993), Cameroon and post-apartheid
South Africa (1996) and Thailand (1997). In Cameroon, public pressure forced the
government to enact press freedom measures in 1991 as a prelude to free elections
and the abolition of censorship the following year.
Watchdogs against bias and inaccuracy
In countries that are sometimes having their first
taste of freedom, excesses and errors seem almost inevitable, including press violations
of privacy, libel and calumny, outrageous behaviour and unwarranted intrusion. Some
new journalists lack experience and training. The issue of responsibility, which
no free media outlet can dodge, soon arises.
Côte d’Ivoire, which had been marked since independence in 1960 by censorship
and self-censorship, is a good example. The explosion of freedom spawned about 80
political parties and a hundred or so newspapers and other publications. Two years
later, only a dozen of the 40 daily papers were still appearing and the government-controlled
press had the upper hand. But the media had become a forum for debate.
After the media explosion, the press was criticized for “lack of training and professional
responsibility, triviality, ill will, over-zealousness, ignorance and political and
religious pressure.” The press mixed politics with intrusion into private life, sometimes
descending into the gutter. This led to a vicious circle whereby the authorities
used media excesses as a pretext to strike at the newly-free media by arresting and
jailing journalists. Many private individuals sued the press.
Côte d’Ivoire’s government and journalists’ trade unions decided to intervene
in September 1995 by drawing up a code of conduct and establishing a press council
modelled on those in Germany and Quebec; one half of the members are publishers,
the other half journalists. This gave birth to the Press Freedom and Professional
Ethics Monitor (OLPED). On World Press Freedom Day in 1999, the World Association
of Newspapers and the French-based non-governmental organization Reporters Sans Frontières
noted that there were “genuinely independent” press organs in Côte d’Ivoire
and that journalists could work safely.
Adopting a code of conduct and setting up an independent press council to monitor
its application and hear complaints from the public are the first two self-regulatory
measures taken in developing countries to head off government intervention and regulation
which would bring unforeseeable restrictions. In the developing world, mechanisms
of this kind also educate the public and promote press freedom.
A trend is now underway. Press councils were set up in South Korea, India, Nepal,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Indonesia in the years after 1960. In the 1990s, a dozen
more appeared–in the Philippines and Mozambique in 1991, Ghana (1992), Nigeria (1992
; revived in 1999), Fiji (1993), Côte d’Ivoire (1994), Senegal (1996), and
Peru, Thailand, South Africa and Tanzania (1997).
Indian communications expert K.S. Venkateswaran thinks that “an effective press council
can ensure that the reader is not short-changed by unscrupulous or shoddy journalistic
practices. The council can give him a platform from which to ventilate his grievances
against biased, inaccurate or inadequate reporting on matters of legitimate public
interest.”
He points out that a council can act more quickly and more cheaply than the courts
in cases where “for example, the government or a public sector undertaking is alleged
to discriminate unfairly against certain newspapers in, say, the allocation of advertising
or newsprint (as often happens in many developing countries).”
When Algeria set up an information council in 1990–an institution that could be criticized
on the grounds that half the members were government representatives and the other
half journalists–it was an unprecedented step towards freedom of expression in the
Arab world. When the country got caught up in a spiral of repression in 1994, the
council was dissolved. Nigeria’s press council was a casualty of dictatorship but
was revived after free elections in 1999.
When Morocco began political reform, a journalistic code of conduct was adopted and
there were calls for a press council. But the most liberal example of self-regulation
is South Africa, which set up a system in 1997 (see
box) clearly based on the Swedish model, the oldest
and one of the most respected in Europe.
In Asia, a seminar organized in 1996 by the Asian Media Information and Communication
Centre (AMIC) in Singapore and Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University revealed that in
most Asian countries press councils were not protecting the local media against attacks
on press freedom or offering ordinary citizens the means to counter abuses by the
media. Since then, however, AMIC has offered many courses and written material about
laws and self-regulation mechanisms. A press council has been set up in Thailand
and Indonesia’s press law was recently amended. A big effort is also being made in
this area by the Asia Press Foundation, which includes 15 or so media institutes
in the region.
The need for codes of conduct is bound to increase with the world media boom. However
wide the North-South gap may be, nothing suggests that the growth of the media in
developing countries–though too slow and inadequate–is going to stop. Despite often
tragic obstacles, wars and economic inequality, media expansion will continue, even
in developing countries. In two big democracies, Brazil and India, the circulation
of the daily press grew by 24 per cent and 47 per cent respectively between 1993
and 1997. Such advances involve setting up or strengthening regulatory and self-regulatory
mechanisms.
A framework for independence
As soon as a national press achieves a significant
level of organization and influence, the issue of its responsibility inevitably arises.
Experience has shown that a press like South Africa’s, despite the country’s colonial
past and history of discrimination, has inherited certain structures which were helpful
when it came to devise a self-regulatory mechanism. It was the same in India where,
taking a cue from the British press, the media played an important part in the achievement
of national independence. Pakistan, which turned away from such structures, has had
a lot more difficulty establishing an independent press.
In developing countries where structures of this kind exist, journalism has a promising
future. A framework for independence and pluralism has now been defined. While it
would be a mistake to ignore the fact that great obstacles lie ahead, the encouraging
progress made so far must be welcomed.
1. Panos Institute, Médias et déontologie
en Afrique de l’Ouest, L’Harmattan, Paris, 1996, p.45.
2. Venkateswaran, K.S. (dir). Media Monitors in Asia, Asian Media Information
and Communication Centre (Amic), Singapore, 1996. p.2.
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