The emphasis in this book is on the public's interest in that process of understanding. I hope this book will contribute to the wider recognition of the stories of their lives.
Shock! Horror! Scandal!
These tabloids offer a critical perspective on the social, economic and political reality in the country. It also examines some of the contradictions of tabloid journalism in the post-apartheid era.
Attack of the Killer Newspapers!
The "imagined community" of the nation, to use Anderson's (1987) famous term, was made possible by a printed culture that gave citizens the space to reflect on their belonging to a larger entity with common interests. and a common language (Conboy 2006, 2). The growth of the penny press in the United States is often cited as an important event in the history of journalism.
Black and White and Read All Over
It will touch on the globalization of the tabloid genre and the spread of "infotainment" through global media, including examples of tabloids elsewhere in Africa and in the history of the South African press. The global ubiquity of cultural goods originating from the West reminds us of the unequal power relations in the process of globalization. The collapse of apartheid coincided with the fall of communism and the rearrangement of global geopolitics.3 Fundamental political changes in the country also made it possible to separate newspaper houses from the political ideologies they advocated during apartheid, which led to the rearrangement of the South African media landscape.
Does this mean that the introduction of the genre into the South African landscape should be seen as an example of "media imperialism"? Both the optimistic and pessimistic views of the impact of globalization on South African society were noted (ibid., 13–14). Any investigation into the relationship between the local and the global in South African tabloids must consider contrasting influences: on the one hand, transnational flows of media formats and genres, and on the other hand the specific local context that shaped them.
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the layout and design of the South African tabloids has been influenced by the British "red tops". The extent and form of this influence differs from tabloid to tabloid.
Not Really Newspapers
In the debates over tabloids, the norms and assumptions of the mainstream press were reflected in a process that might be referred to as "paradigm restoration." The criticism of the tabloids ultimately boiled down to whether they fit the definition of journalism. Paradigm restoration in South African journalism must be understood against the backdrop of the shift towards professional media self-regulation that accompanied the transition to democracy.
Finding scapegoats in the tabloids may have served to soften some of the criticism that would otherwise have been directed at the respectable stream. However, in South Africa, normative debates about the media have started quite recently with the country's democratization in 1994. Values such as accountability, objectivity and truth-telling formed the foundation of the mainstream media's codes of ethics. .
In the discussion so far in this chapter, it has been suggested that the popularity of tabloids points to certain faults or deficiencies in the mainstream journalism paradigm in South Africa.
Critics of the tabloids have argued that they neglect this political role and that in some cases they even work against the new democratic culture. Reducing the importance of political debate in a society that is keenly aware of the importance of promoting a new democratic culture was not welcome. This, then, is one of the ironies or paradoxes that complicate the view of the political role played by South African tabloids.
This is that the construction of the reader as an individual rather than as part of a political collective has implications for the content and approach of tabloids to stories. So we went to support Khutsong - we got the look of the man in blue and asked for an explanation. The ambivalent relationship is equally true of claims such as Du Plessis's that the "generally man in blue" is "the boss" in terms of the political coverage they provide.
The day after the election, there was no coverage of the election in the Cape Town-based Daily Voice.
Truth or Trash?
A reader in Makhado summed it up like this: "The Daily Sun gives us the full overview, everything is covered, there are no secrets. The Daily Sun stays with a story and tells us everything." It is "staying with a story", more typical of the long-term commitment to social issues associated with civic or public journalism than the conventional, event-based journalism of commercial media, is an important aspect that sets South African tabloids apart from their "quality press" counterparts. The Daily Sun covers what's happening in this [part of] the country." The only group that did not seem to trust tabloids more than mainstream newspapers was a group of young black urban professionals who worked as media analysts for a media analysis company and were exposed to a wide range of media and whose choices were based on their social mobility.
In his study of tabloid newspapers in Britain, Conboy (2006) reflected on how tabloids in that country could "construct a community through language." The construction takes place through narratives that reinforce the boundaries between insiders and outsiders, often identified in terms of race and ethnicity, with xenophobia as an extreme form of prejudice against outsiders (ibid., 94). These comments are consistent with Benedict Anderson's (1987) view of the role of print media in building an "imagined community". The fact that the reconstruction of citizenship and nationhood – even when limited to the bourgeois dimensions of everyday life – is facilitated by the highly commercial enterprises of tabloid newspapers supports his prominence of "print capitalism" as the foundation of the modern nation. Assessed from the point of view of mainstream South African journalism, with its high commitment to values such as truth, accuracy and verifiability (the first point of the South African Press Code reads: "The press shall be obliged to report news truthfully, accurately and fairly" [SA Press Council 2008]), news reports about supernatural events go against ethical and responsible journalism.17.
It's a Christian country we live in, we have to accept what's happening here, you can't change it.” The most resistance one could offer under such circumstances was to perform a negotiation reading.
The editor of the Daily Voice, Karl Brophy, recounts that journalists working for that tabloid were "treated like heroes coming home" when they visited a nightclub in Cape Town (cited in Glenn and Knaggs 2008): "The DJ stood up in the box and announced that the Daily Voice was in the house. A journalist at the Sun who had previously worked at a commercial community newspaper believed that tabloid readers had much more faith in the power of the paper to solve their problems to solve than was the case at the other newspapers she worked at: The perception is that we are the people's newspaper. A journalist at Son noted how she can find a deeper level of seriousness and emotion in her current work public than when she worked at a commercial community newspaper: “These are sad stories, but I enjoy writing them.
Afterwards, the editor warned us: "This was the first and last time you put football on the front page, we are an Afrikaans rugby newspaper." Rapport's sales dropped by something like 30,000 copies that day. Du Plessis did not think this took away the reporters' voice and said: “Their voice is incoherent, it is not a voice. Du Plessis claimed that he relied heavily on Khumalo's advice: "Themba's advice is non-negotiable.
There may be a similarity between life as lived, a life as experienced and a life as told, but the anthropologist should never accept the similarity nor fail to make the distinction. The value of examining the professional identity constructions of tabloid journalists is that they provide a window into the discourse on professionalization and the role of journalism in post-apartheid South African society.
Conclusion
The South African tabloids are clearly linked to a very specific set of circumstances and events. This book has attempted to understand South African tabloids not only as journalistic forms associated with a particular society, but also as examples of a genre with exponents in different parts of the world. Seen in this way, the South African tabloids can be seen as closely linked to the transitions South Africa has been going through since democratisation.
Understanding South African tabloids as part of a complex pattern of social and political shifts in the country does not mean that they should be considered in isolation from regional and global trends and developments. The point of this book was not to make a direct comparison between South African tabloids and their counterparts in other parts of the world, but to achieve a deeper understanding of the South African situation. These characteristics can only be properly understood if we consider South African tabloids as social phenomena that require a multi-level approach such as that of this book.
Although South African tabloid journalists note the freedom they experience on tabloids as opposed to working in the mainstream, they display a remarkably strong commitment to the communities they report on.
