Social Justice and Citizenship in South Africa: The Media’s Role

This chapter will focus on some specific issues pertaining to media ethics, democracy, and citizenship in South Africa. As a postcolonial, ‘new’ democracy marked by huge socio-economic inequalities, while at the same time emerging as a regional economic growth point, South Africa’s struggles to deepen democracy via media may suggest some similarities with other emerging economies, for instance India, one of its partners in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) alignment of states. The growing socio-economic inequalities that accompany South Africa’s rise as an emerging economy bear resemblance to the double-edged story of ‘unprecedented success or extraordinary failure’ that can be told about contemporary India (Dreze and Sen 2011) and also characterize countries like Brazil, where contradictions between economic growth and internal inequalities are also stark. Comparisons between India and South Africa have indeed been suggested by scholars working in comparative political studies (e.g. Heller 2009), as well as scholars in the field of ‘Indian Ocean Studies’ (e.g. Moorthy and Jamal 2009), who studied the socio-cultural exchanges between these two countries and their neighbors in early stages of contemporary globalization. Some research has also been done in comparative media ethics between South Africa and India (see Rao and Wasserman 2007, Wasserman and Rao 2008).