The Print Media in South Africa: Paving the Way for 'Privatisation

Since the end of apartheid, national and local governments in South Africa have been involved in the commercialisation and marketisation of a wide range of public services. This article examines the responses of the mainstream media to these neo-liberal initiatives, looking specifically at English-language newspapers and their converge of water, electricity and waste management services. We explore the extent to which the print media can be deemed to be in favour of privatisation as well as the more subtle, discursive ways in which it covers these issues. We argue that these corporate media outlets in South Africa generate and perpetuate a neo-liberal discourse on privatisation, but that this dialogue is neither omnipotent nor monolithic. Nevertheless, it is exactly this facade of objectivity which gives neo-liberalism its hegemony. By appearing to give equal space to different points of view there is a perception of balance in the press that obscures the more subtle, opinion-making discourses that generate neo-liberal biasses. We conclude with a brief discussion of what might be done to counter this neo-liberal authority. The 'privatisation' of municipal services has been a flash point for public policy debates around the world. From New York to Buenos Aires there have been loud and often heated disagreements about the merits and demerits of private sector involvement in essential services such as water and electricity. This is true of South Africa as well, where governments at all levels ave been transforming the nature and scale of public ownership and public management. Although the trend began in the late 1980s under the neo-apartheid National Party government, it was not until the election of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1994 - and the solidification of the ANC's electoral base with local government elections in 1995/6 - that the push to privatise services began in earnest. So thorough has this shift been that even the Free Market Foundation of South Africa can claim - with obvious delight - that the 'privatisation of state-owned assets (has been) a guiding economic principle of South Africa's first democratically elected government' (Spindler, 2004:1). Strictly speaking, however, there has been relatively little outright privatisation in South Africa (and hence our use of quotation marks around the word). Although some state entities have been sold in whole or in part to private investor (e.g. Telkom) most private sector involvement in state services in South Africa has been in the form of public-private partnerships (PPPs).