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The Daily Voice and the return of the Coloured repressed
Ian Glenn and Angie Knaggs,
CFMS
UCT
Introduction.
The rise of South African tabloids has generated more academic heat than light and revealed the
poverty of existing media theorising in South Africa. The danger is that, as commentators like
Rian Malan join the fray and the old broadsheet press and academics become the butt of amused
ridicule, the only academic response will be either more heated moralising or belated jumping
onto an increasingly powerful bandwagon. (The invitation to Deon du Plessis, the force behind
The Sun, to speak at the 2005 SACOMM conference of media academics shows that some
media academics are already suing for peace, so to speak. And, as advertisers increasingly
switch resources to tabloids, the theoretical and practical antagonism of media academics and
educators to tabloids risks having very real consequences in that the skills and attitudes they
impart to students may not equip them to deal with the new demands of the print marketplace.
Lizette Rabe, a columnist for News 24 and Professor at the University of Stellenbosch, and
Professor Guy Berger, the head of Rhodes Journalism School, have been particularly outspoken
about their views against the role that tabloids play in South Africa. In this paper, we will quote
their most extreme views at some length, as they are probably highly typical of media academics’
views, in order to set them against other approaches. (In the full body of their comments on
tabloids, both have a far more complex and nuanced reaction to tabloids than the quotes in this
piece suggest.)
In this paper, we suggest two major theoretical approaches – which we can summarise as a)
news institutionalism and b) a field theory of social and symbolic capital – to understanding what
has been and is happening in the tabloids and try to show the relevance of these approaches by
considering the case of The Daily Voice in Cape Town. The editor of the paper is Karl Brophy, a
former spin doctor for the Irish Government. He then worked for The Daily Mirror in London and
then a newspaper called the Irish Examiner before joining the Irish Independent. He was then
sent to Cape Town to set up the Daily Voice. In an interview in 2005, Karl Brophy spoke at length
about his sense of tabloids and attacks on them. Through liberal quotation from this interview
throughout this paper, we hope to show that our approach comes closer to making sense of the
values underlying the paper and of its success and of readers’ responses to it than other
accounts have done.
I: News institutions and the sociology of the newsroom
A major trend in recent American and European media research has been a return to the
sociology of news production, with work on the conditions in the newsroom and broadcast studio,
pressures on reporters, and the economic pressures as felt in practice rather than as theorised
(Benson, 2004, Born, Schudson). Even if one were not to insist on a title of “American new
institutionalism”, as Benson does, it seems that academics are again spending time examining
the real conditions of media labour rather than generalising and essentialising about media
ownership and political economy on a grand scale.
One of the surprising features about some of the heated academic strictures on tabloids was
precisely the essentialising and othering of tabloids into one category, as though there were not
key differences between British and American and South African tabloids, between the National
Inquirer and The Sun [UK], between The Sun [SA] and Die Son and The Daily Voice (see, for
example, Esser on some key differences between German and Anglo-American tabloid
conventions). Academics, in fact, became guilty of a kind of media racism against which they
presumably warn their students:
They look a lot like newspapers. They feel like newspapers; they even leave ink on your
fingertips. Some are owned by newspaper companies. Most are celebrating soar-away
circulations.
They’re called, of course, the tabloids. But an indication that they are not really newspapers, and
that they play in the entertainment market rather than prosecute the business of information, is
that they are conspicuously absent from the entrants to the Mondi Shanduka Newspaper
Journalism Awards.
Their circulation success dazzles some, and there may even be those admirers who believe this
competition should develop special categories to attract them. We’d probably then be announcing
winners for stories such as “Most creative invention”, “Excellence in hyping”, or “Best adherence
to simplistic archetypes like innocent hubby cuckolded by treacherous wife”. (Berger, 2005a).
Now what was surprising was precisely that these comments, a kind of media ink on the fingers if
not pencil in the hair test, emerged not in an academic piece or op-ed article, but at the Mondi
Awards 2005, in Guy Berger’s opening address as convener judge of the awards.
In reality, the division between tabloids such as The Voice and other papers may never have
been that big and, over time, as other papers have tried to play catch-up, has diminished. In an
average week in Cape Town, it is often difficult to distinguish between papers simply going on the
banner poster headlines. When comparing stories that are carried by tabloids and other papers,
the tabloids often out-report and out-write the supposedly sober and accurate broadsheets – a
case in point that a senior media class studied in some length was the reporting and
photographing of the bus tragedy on a school outing on Signal Hill in which the Argus resorted to
sensationalist reporting while the Voice reported in far more depth and accurately. (As far as
media ethics go, the tabloids in some respects have a superior code of conduct – we have in
Cape Town had the media scandal of the Argus cannibalising material from the Cape Times
without proper acknowledgment and in many cases the broadsheets pick up stories broken by the
tabloids without acknowledgment.)
What critics have not noticed or chosen to ignore is that the tabloids do far more real reporting –
at least in Cape Town – than the other English papers, whose reporting staffs were gutted by
savage budget cuts during the 90s and early 2000s. Because The Daily Voice chooses not to
subscribe to news wire services, but rather to invest in local reporters, it has to create its own
local stories rather than relying on a heavy proportion of national and international news that is
not original, not produced for their particular audience, and does not need any legwork by local
reporters. (One of the pernicious features of globalisation may be that major media players have
significant financial stakes in big wire services and thus have every interest in maximising the
amount of news from these services rather than investing in local reporters or writers.)
The corollary of this is that the Voice has to hire good local writers, including some of UCT’s best
graduates. One of them, Gavin Haynes, took the part of a modern Mr Drum, going into places like
morgues, bad hospitals and garbage trucks to report. In discussion about why he managed to find
a job on the Voice, but not on other local papers, he made the point that a huge amount of media
coverage in South Africa is trivial international celebrity news which can easily bypass local
reporting, whereas finding out the scandal or problems of a local community demanded local
reporters.
Another corollary of this is that the Voice works largely on local news and relies heavily on the
local community for tips and leads. They have dedicated phone lines which are manned
constantly to receive tips. Because it follows these up, it gets more community response and
following. The virtuous cycle of reporting and action in making ideas public has made it possible
for the Voice to be an agenda setter in several key local issues with major implications for local
politics, issues such as the pressure on the ANC mayor to fire her media advisor, Blackman
Ngoro, for racist attacks on Coloureds, and on the mayor to cut down a bush where attacks on
women and children were taking place.
Brophy reacted fairly vehemently to Berger’s criteria for judging the newsworthiness of pieces at
the Mondi Awards:
If Guy Berger wants to talk about us doing good for the community, we have run a number of
social issues, particularly the one around the bush in Blue Downs where all the women and
children are being raped and murdered. We have consistently, I think from the fourth day of
publication, campaigned on that bush, we got the mayor to promise to chop it down. And we have
hammered the mayor for months about that bush and now finally, last week it started getting
chopped down. It’s good, our readers wanted it. We were accused of just doing it for sales. But
what people don’t recognize is that there is no dichotomy between doing something for sales and
doing something that is good. Because if your readers want it and they agree with you and
identify with you, they will buy your newspaper. And we are reflecting what they want.
The Voice broke more stories than any of the Cape Town newspapers combined in 2005 yetdid
not get awards in the newspaper categories at the Mondis, presumably because they are a
tabloid. Brophy reacted ironically to Lizette Rabe, who had praised an award-winning story about
golf courses for the Mondis in 2005 and said it showed a phenomenon ‘dividing the nation like
never before’.
Now, forgive me for thinking that golf courses are not as bad as the Group Areas act. Or
Vlakplaas or Eugene de Kock. And she accuses us of sensationalizing. You know, all of a sudden
golf courses are worse than apartheid.
The first key argument of news sociology is then about news values and news production. The
middle-class academic view of important news finds a robust counter in Brophy’s defence of
tabloid concerns:
The thing about this town [Cape Town] is that it has great news. I don’t mean its all good news.
The stuff that happens here, it’s incredible. One of the criticisms of tabloids is that we
sensationalize things; there is absolutely no necessity to sensationalize any news in Cape Town
because it’s sensational anyway. Like in the last number of months, we have a woman on trial for
the youngest contract killing in the world. With a contract killing of a baby, you can’t
sensationalize that. You know I think South African newspapers are guilty of de-sensationalizing
news. Like when the Cape Times or Die Burger or any other newspaper carries two to four
paragraphs on page 8 or page 10 saying that there were 12 murders in Khayelitsha on the
weekend, that’s de-sensationalizing things.
If one takes local reporting seriously and wants to come to terms with the daily reality of rape and
murder, then tabloids are, arguably, far more socially responsible than the broadsheets who
neglect, as Brophy suggests, violence and lawlessness in the wider community, but react with
horror when whites are the targets of random gang violence.
The second major set of charges is that the tabloids simply break all the ethical rules of good
journalism. Rabe has argued that tabloid journalists in South Africa won’t let a lack of factual
evidence get in the way of a good story (Rabe, 2005c). In her column entitled ‘Tabloid journalists
watch out!’, Rabe attacks South African tabloid journalistic integrity, saying that:
The sad fact is, it seems, that some tabloids still don't follow the rule of let the facts, indeed, stand
in the way of a good story.
A typical example - and it happened a week or so ago: the newspaper - oh, pardon, they are not
(yet) worthy of the name newspaper? Okay, then, let's be specific, stick to tabloid, but carry on
with the story.
So, the tabloid picks up a rumour. It manufactures its copy based on the rumour. In the process,
someone vaguely remembers, hey, they've got to at least verify it against some sort of credible
source. Get the other side of the story. Go and check the facts.
And then the rumour turns out to be a non-story. The facts are watertight and above-board. But,
heck, let's ignore those facts, and run with the malicious, juicy skinner instead. With the result, a
single-source story. Anonymous, of course. Most probably an individual grinding his or her axe
through an unprofessional (or is it naïve?) journalist.
Joe Thloloe (chairman of SANEF) has expressed concern that ‘[t]he challenge for SANEF now
lies ahead: whether a point will come when tabloid members should be censured for fabrications,
unwarranted invasions of privacy, or other ethical lapses’ (Berger, 2005: 2). Thloloe implied that
tabloids will inevitably have ethical lapses; it is just a matter of time.
These are huge assumptions to be making about a set of newspapers who have yet to see any
significant defamation cases lodged against them though, given what we have observed about
news production, the tabloids are actually far more at risk in that they are reporting far more
substantially on a daily basis about local events and reputations. Brophy’s comments on the
quality of his journalists makes the obvious points:
Our rules, the rules that we have on verification and on how we verify and check stories are
exactly the same as those followed by the Cape Argus and Cape Times. Actually, if you talk to
our lawyer, he will tell you that we are actually far better at it because we do slightly more
aggressive stories we have to be a lot more careful, we have to absolutely sure of a story
because when we take a line on a story we take it very hard, and therefore have to be absolutely
sure of our facts.
If you look at our newsroom, it’s a senior newsroom; we have more people on higher grades that
are young. If you went to speak to Chris Whitfield downstairs in the Cape Times, who is a friend
of mine, he would kill for any of these journalists. The way that we structured our staff was that
we wanted very senior journalists because we have to be very sure of the facts and we expect
high productivity out of them.
While the question of audience reactions is properly the subject of further study, the circulation
success of The Daily Voice suggests that readers find the local reporter dealing with their
concerns a more palatable repast than the bland international fare of the news wires.
Brophy suggests that their stories and the fact that The Daily Voice is seen as having the
interests of the community at heart give them a community status that no broadsheet enjoys:
I’ve been out in the West End, at the Galaxy there [a local night club], a couple of months ago,
with all our journalists, and they are treated like heroes coming home. The DJ got up into the box
and announced that the Daily Voice was in the house. And the place went crazy. And it’s
madness, it’s crazy; I have never seen a reaction like that to a publication before.
The frustration felt by those working in the tabloid industry is evident in Karl Brophy’s comments.
His journalists are actually doing journalism – they are leaving their comfortable offices (and
wires), braving the Cape Town weather and gang violence to print socially relevant stories, only
to be told that they are not worthy of journalistic recognition. Brophy had some harsh words for
the academic critics, suggesting that there are academic blind spots preventing a constructive
engagement with local media:
These people don’t know a good story if it hits them in the face, they are sitting up in
Stellenbosch, or down in bloody Grahamstown, pontificating on the state of the media. They
constantly bemoan the state of the nation’s media and completely disregard the fact that their
bloody departments produce half the bloody people who work in it. You know a little introspection
might be required Mister Berger. You know, if the media is shite, it’s probably your fault.
In our next section, we will look at whether a different understanding of the journalistic field in
South Africa might enable a more constructive and comfortable engagement between academics
and the tabloids.
II: Social and symbolic capital and field theory
One of the problems with reactions to tabloids, we suggest, lies in idealistic notions of the role
media should play in constructing a new, better, national identity, in line with constitutional values
and proper ethical standards and, usually, progressive values. Once again, Guy Berger spelt out
his position uncompromisingly. Returning to the issue of tabloids after the SANEF debate on
tabloids, he moderated his Mondi tone considerably, but still disputed whether selling 400 000
copies of the Daily Sun [now 500 000] could be seem as being as significant for South Africa as
the 38 000 sales of the political and socially influential Mail & Guardian. He further defended his
earlier harsh criticism by arguing that the popularity of tabloid newspapering should not be at the
expense of credible journalism or the promotion of values that are in line with the South African
Constitution.
My call was to integrate the “progressive” with the “popular”, else an opportunity for meaningful
print journalism catering to the masses would continue to be missed (Berger, 2005: 2).
This strand of media critique lies in the sense that the tabloids espouse bad values as social
intermediaries – in critics’ eyes they are racist, sexist, parochial. The Daily Voice appeals, it is
true, in many ways to an overwhelmingly Coloured Cape Flats working-class community and
takes for granted a Coloured identity that the South African political system seem designed to
minimise (Piombo) and whose reality progressive academics would prefer to deny. The page
three girls in The Daily Voice reduce women to the status of sex objects and have incurred many
complaints and hostile comments. During the Zuma trial and the major political events of the day,
the Daily Voice resolutely continued to cover the trial of Baby Lee Jordan or the shenanigans in
the Cape Town mayor’s office. In short, critics argue, the tabloids do not give the progressive
world-view, the broad coverage of the political sphere and the major world events of the time that
media critics and journalism professors hope enlightened media would.
Some of the theoretical basis for this reaction may lie in a longing for a Habermasian notion of
media as the spaces for a rational social dialogue, though as the tabloids are demonstrably the
print media the least affected by business and commercial pressures, they would, paradoxically,
seem to be in the best position to fulfil his ideals as being uncontaminated by sectional interests
(Habermas, 1989, 1992). Most of the reactions, however, seem more a question of judgements of
taste from people who have forgotten Bourdieu’s dictum that “Taste classifies, and classifies the
classifier”.
Another major underpinning of local analysis of identity politics in a lot of South African cultural
studies work is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, though Anderson’s work on how
national language and media combine to create a national identity precisely plays down the class,
sociolinguistic, regional, racial and ethnic divisions that make South African media so complex.
South Africa never had, very simply, one language of nationalism. It had a (long) moment of
Afrikaner nationalism which met many of his criteria but that linguistic, political and cultural
construction was, precisely, not a national but a group construction – one whose legacies
precisely complicate if not invalidate any prospect of applying his analysis onto South Africa.
In considering what the tabloids have done and are doing for and to their communities, we would
argue that the most useful theoretical approaches lie in considering, fairly dispassionately, the
social and symbolic capitals involved in how they operate in the field of journalism. Recent work
by Beaudoin and Thorson (2004, 2006), and by Benson (1999, 2004, Benson & Neveu, 2004)
and Couldry (2003) and others, drawing on the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu (1979. 1993,
1996, 1998, 2004, Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) and Robert Putnam (1995, 2000) in particular,
suggests interesting comparative and cross-cultural analyses of news values and media
production.
In short, Putnam, in well known articles like “Bowling Alone” argues that modern American life
has lost many of the social bonds that marked earlier communities, and attributes much of this to
modern media consumption. To live in the television world is to suffer a loss of community, of
neighbourhood interaction and social engagement. Very simply, his analysis of social capital
suggests that tabloids, rather than contributing to this anomie through coverage of the distant and
the abstract, build on and solidify kinds of social solidarity and social capital that traditional
broadsheets ignore and snub by omission. A newspaper full of wire stories that say very little
about the lived conditions of people on the Cape Flats may appeal to middle-class academic
notions of newsworthiness, but it in fact does very little to empower or give dignity to local
residents facing corrupt police, ongoing white racism, gang violence or government neglect.
Bourdieu’s notion of social and symbolic capital and the field as the locus for struggles for value is
more complex and more satisfying, we contend, than Putnam’s, but, while we can simply point
here to more extended and elaborate settings out of the theoretical paradigms (see particularly
Benson, 2004, Bourdieu, 2004, Bourdieu & Wacquant), let us simply insist on a key feature of
Bourdieu’s symbolic value and social capital: it is relational, caught in tension and struggle with
others in the political, social and professional field.
Social and symbolic capital explain how and why The Daily Voice differs from The Sun or what
the entertainment and sports focus of the tabloids is and why. It even, we argue, explains why
The Daily Voice runs sexually salacious semi-nude pictures of page 3 girls, while The Sun does
not. (It certainly explains precisely why middle class academics with high social capital resent
many of the features of the tabloids.) We will through later examples attempt to clarify what the
relational notion of symbolic capital means in terms of the everyday practices of the Daily Voice.
Though a fuller treatment of this topic would need a far more detailed market analysis of the
readership of tabloids, through AMPS figures and local interviews, to flesh out the kind of media
and cultural mapping of South Africa that would correspond to Bourdieu’s attempt in La
Distinction to chart the homologies between cultural consumption and capital and symbolic capital
(140-41), we will risk, at the conclusion of the paper, a tentative mapping of the cultural space
occupied by the tabloids as opposed to traditional media.
Some preliminary figures from The Sun suggest precisely what is at stake. Of the 500 000 daily
buyers, the paper’s own analysts suggest that over 90% are home owners. (It isn’t, however,
clear how many of the 2.5 million daily readers are.) In other words, the readers of this tabloid
are, overwhelmingly, on the first steps of petit-bourgeois and bourgeois socialisation, with the
needs for instruction in the complexities of modern citizenship. This strategic planning of the
content of this newspaper to meet these needs precisely, research undertaken with the input of
Jos Kuper and her analysis of tabloids in India in particular, has simply been neglected by most
media critics (Bloom).
That its readers still stoutly maintain many traditional African beliefs is something the paper
respects, as Rian Malan recounts in his story of decisions taken on how to explain a man moving
his bed onto the roof during the night. The paper decides to take the beliefs of its readers
seriously, rather than disregard or mock them. Here, then, we have a tabloid coming to terms, as
its readers must, with living in a world of traditional belief and globalised systems.
In the case of The Daily Voice, who have a daily print run of 60 000, the audience is very much
multi-lingual working and middle class Coloureds living on the Cape Flats. While we do not yet
have AMPS or ABCs for the paper, their own research suggests that 60% of their readers fall
within LSM 4 to 7, with home language split fifty-fifty between English and Afrikaans. Their
research suggests there are equal numbers of male and female readers. Importantly, 40% of their
readers fall in LSMs 8-10, suggesting both that the paper is reaching a more affluent group than
critics contend and that it is likely to attract more advertising.
The group designated as Coloured is the majority in Cape Town and the Western Cape. While
the political, social and existential dilemmas of this group have been the subject of considerable
academic discussion, our argument here is simply that the Voice articulates the concerns of a
strong, neglected regional group by addressing their social concerns.
Complaints about the social capital of The Daily Voice often focus on the most traditional
shibboleth of middle-class respectability: being well-spoken and using proper English. The paper,
notoriously, switches codes as much of its audience does, using Afrikaans words for emphasis or
because the words resonate in ways the English equivalents don’t. If it thinks it will make its point
more clearly, it will say, in the words of one famous banner headline: ‘Moffie hooker shot in gat’
instead of ‘Gay prostitute shot in buttocks’.
Brophy’s comments on this issue are revealing in pointing out that all newspapers carry a kind of
social capital in the speech codes they use:
I don’t know what language construction you’re supposed to use in newspapers. I come from
Ireland, and a large amount of words in Irish use have entered the English lexicon around the
world. Words like ‘Shebeen’ have even made it all the way down the here. And in terms of
numbers, we are predominantly an English newspaper, but, initial statistics suggest that 48% of
our readers speak Afrikaans as their home language but they prefer to read English. You know, I
hesitate to give you the banal attitude that it’s the language that people speak on the street
because it’s not, no journalism is. Like nobody ever says, ‘he slammed the majors’ in normal
speech. There is a certain lexicon, newspeak, which has been slightly adapted for our
newspaper. But nobody speaks like they write in the Cape Times, or the Cape Argus either.
To push this analysis further – when the Voice switches codes, it validates its readers’ peculiar
regional ability to move between two language groups and sets of influences. Instead of a
bastardised language as a sign of an uncertain racial identity, the Voice offers an unapologetic
hybridity as a source of moral critique and group knowledge. Where Benedict Anderson saw new
languages as signs of new identities and political movements, this embracing of the complex
ambivalences of the linguistic, cultural and political past allows Coloureds to accept themselves
unapologetically and claim a moral space on the grounds of this very complexity.
Let us extend this analysis, by way of elaboration, to three other contested issues: the page 3
girls; the treatment of sport; and the coverage of television. While The Sun argues that its readers
are too conservative to have bare-breasted page 3 girls in the tradition of its British namesake,
The Daily Voice has insisted on this tradition. How are we to account for this decision, which has
probably cost them in terms of the tone of the paper and perhaps in making it difficult for them to
gain access to certain households, advertisers, and possibly even a greater number of female
readers?
Here we would argue that middle-class sensibility and hypocrisy combine to stop a lucid
consideration of this insistence on what Brian McNair has perceptively analysed as ‘the
democratization of desire’ (McNair, 2002). While upper middle magazines such as FHM and GQ
aimed at the white male market have become steadily more explicit sexually over the past
decade, we have also in South Africa seen a huge rise in the amount of sexual material available
on open time on ETV and, on satellite, on DSTV. There is a flourishing industry for Internet
pornography and other new digital forms of sexually explicit material such as cell-phone aural and
visual material. It might be stretching the point to say that access to porn is part of middle class
amenities in South Africa now, but not by much.
The pictures of the page three girls thus act both as a critique of middle class hypocrisy where
what must be kept secret, behind wrapped covers, or in the secrecy of the private computer or
cell phone, is simply made explicit, normal, not to be apologised for. These pages serve as a kind
of reductio ad absurdum of the cult of the naked female body and the artistic pretensions
surrounding it in most upper or middle class erotica, pornography and art. In Bourdieu’s terms,
the ‘distinctions’ of middle class erotica (poses, expensive underwear, make-up) both get paid lip
service, to show that this audience understands the conventions but the treatment also suggests
that that, after all, a body is only a body, those are only nipples or buttocks. It’s only sex. Whereas
the Sun readers are in a mode of petit bourgeois respectability, the Voice readers, the paper
suggests, want their right to partake in postmodern erotic mediated identity but also to take a
sardonic working class distance from it.
The second obvious manifestation of this mediated identity lies in the amount of the paper
devoted to sport and entertainment and to international as well as local sport. This, it might be
argued, runs counter to the argument about local social capital in the previous section, but as
Julia Stuart and others have shown, the Cape Flats has had a long and strong association with
British football in particular as a powerful local tradition, in part because of a tradition of British
professionals coming here to train local clubs. The success of Cape Flats stars like Benni
McCarthy, Shaun Bartlett and Quentin Fortune in European football has also given a source of
local pride. To see a local player in a team that is ostensibly English but is composed of
international stars is to imagine a new form of meritocratic and international and chosen identity
that escapes a local habitation and a name.
To live on the Cape Flats but be a Liverpool or a Man U or an Arsenal fan is to inhabit, by
extension, a realm of high social capital and achievement. While the Voice pays considerable
attention to local soccer and rugby and other sports, it shows, once again, that in terms of social
capital its readers occupy a quite different place to that of Sun readers whose passion would be
primarily for local clubs like Bucs or Chiefs. The Voice accepts the logic corollary of this which is
to accept that many of its readers, however modest their income, will follow sport on DSTV and,
certainly on ETV and SABC. (The high proportion of readers in LSMs 8-10 shows that this
emphasis is quite justified.)
What holds for sport holds also for entertainment. For the Cape Flats, this overwhelmingly means
the most democratic broadcast medium, television. While the paper probably favours ETV over
other stations (its programmes are the first listed), it also accepts that some of its readers will
have M-Net and that many will watch SABC.
While, as academic media critics, we might all wish the readers of the Voice to read improving
books, or do other worthier things than watch the box, the reality for most of us is that affordable
pleasure consists primarily of televised entertainment. Once again, the Voice insists that its
readers have a full right to views on the range of television options, whereas the Sun deals
primarily with vernacular television.
Part of the failure of previous progressive left-wing Cape Flats papers such as Grassroots
stemmed, as Lukas Opatrny is showing in a thesis in process, from an ideological ambivalence.
Editors at once wanted community participation but were also committed to Black Consciousness
ideals which had the effect, at some point, of insisting that Coloureds should see their identity as
one with the majority African population. One of the effects of this, we suggest, might precisely
have been to prevent the papers from drawing on the particular social capital and cultural
experience of its intended audience.
If we accept that social capital is relational, then any paper will necessarily have a stance to those
perceived to be in more or less powerful places on the social and media field.
The advantage of using social and symbolic capital is that it gets us away from the highly charged
and pejorative charges of racism into broader considerations of class and culture. As Brophy
points out:
Unfortunately in this country there is a correlation between race and class which is always going
to be a problem because apartheid was a self fulfilling and self perpetuating political system. And
unfortunately, at the moment, you can still talk about your readers in terms of race when you
really should be talking about readers in terms of class. Elsewhere in the world, everybody deals
with newspapers’ readers in terms of class. In Britain, in the UK, newspapers are aimed at people
in a certain classes. Now our newspaper is quite clearly aimed at a working class population; now
unfortunately it so happens because of apartheid, the vast majority of that population happens to
be of a certain pigmentation.
The related question is whether tabloids should have the duty of social do-gooder because they
are aimed at the working class, as Berger suggested in his wish for a progressive popular press.
Brophy argues that Berger’s position is condescendingly classist because he thinks the lower
classes need to be educated by a progressive press:
We’re not social workers, we’re not sociologists, we produce newspapers that people want to
read. This is a democracy (belatedly). If people have the power and franchise to vote and they
are trusted with the vote and they are trusted to select who they want to rule, I’m absolutely
confident that they are mature enough to select what newspapers they should be reading and not
reading.
That, of course, leaves us with the tantalising question raised by Anton Harber about The Sun.
Could the tabloids be the new force on the political scene in South Africa? What influence did The
Voice have on recent local government elections in Cape Town? What will its coverage of local
politics (a recent headline had all the local contenders for political office in Cape Town portrayed
as Smurfs) mean for civic participation down the road?
We suggest that the applause heard in Galaxy came from the sense that The Voice represented
Coloured Cape Town in a way no politicians could or would. Media scholars need to watch
closely to see if it keeps that close relationship with its readers and how it uses that power in the
months and years ahead.
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