SWAZILAND TABLOID NEWSPAPERS

The Tabloid Explosion, an exploration of the tabloid press and television in Southern Africa, was launched on Tuesday (12 September 2007). This special edition of the Gender and Media Diversity Journal looks at the debate about whether tabloids are a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ thing. It also looks at the human rights perspective and whose voices get into the tabloids.

The journal is well worth reading and I recommend it, but I took exception to one of the articles, which claimed that there were no tabloid newspapers in Swaziland. I think this is wrong. And wrong big time.

First of all we need to define what we mean by ‘tabloid’ and then ask why people are bothered about whether the press is tabloid or not.

The main characteristic of the tabloid is that it concentrates on news that is not serious. I wrote on Wednesday that the two daily newspapers in Swaziland, the Swazi Observer and the Times of Swaziland had assigned between 40 percent and 44 percent of editorial space to entertainments and sport (the most ‘non-serious’ news there is) combined. That doesn’t leave room for much else.

Other things you notice about the tabloid press are that they have a large amount of visual material, such as pictures, and big headlines and a lot of the pages are in vivid colour.

Tabloid newspapers contain short reports, which lack detail and avoid complicated explanations; for the tabloids there are usually only two sides of a story (often with someone who is ‘right’ and someone who is ‘wrong’). In the Swazi newspapers, often there are not even two sides to a story, as reporters prefer to use only a single source of information in their reports.

People think it matters whether newspapers are tabloid or not because there is a general widespread unhappiness about the state of the media. This isn’t something that is particular to Swaziland or southern Africa. Across the world there is a feeling that standards of journalism are falling and papers today are worse than newspapers in the past.

Critics believe today’s newspapers contain sensationalism, prurience, triviality and malice and in a drive for profits newspaper owners who are competing for small and even diminishing markets use ‘tabloid’ type material to gain readers who are attractive to advertisers. It is by attracting advertisers that the newspaper companies make their profits.

So how ‘tabloid’ is the Swazi Press? Take a look at any front page of any of the five newspapers that are published in the kingdom during any week and you can see that usually there is a big picture, a big headline (only one story is on the page), hardly any text (sometimes none at all). There may be ‘teaser’ lines and pictures that direct people to articles that are inside the newspaper.

The front page of the Times of Swaziland from 22 August 2007 (pictured above) shows all the elements of the tabloid. A big headline ‘Residents Fight Cops Over Booze’ dominates the page, along with three subsidiary headlines (e.g. ‘As truck carrying booze overturns in 12-car accident’). These are meant to whet the appetitive of readers and make them want to read more.

There is no text with the headline; instead you have to turn over to page two to find out what the story’s all about. There is a big dramatic picture (in colour) showing the booze on the road and people trying to get at it.

The rest of the page has ‘tasters’ for other reports that are inside the paper (‘Manzini Wanderers Lose Violence Case’) and details of a competition. If you stand back from the page a little you can see that it is not really a ‘news’ page, instead it is a poster advertising the newspapers. It is meant to look exciting on a newsstand and encourage people to buy the paper, even if they had not intended to. The Times of Swaziland’s rival the Swazi Observer is trying to do exactly the same thing with its front page.

One way of getting an idea of what kinds of stories newspapers think are most important is to look at what they publish as their main (or lead) story on their front pages.

I looked at one month’s worth of all the Swazi newspapers (8 August to 7 September 2007) and found that the stories were overwhelmingly sensational or trivial. In the Times, 11 out of 21 front pages had a crime story (in the Observer it was seven out of 21). The other front pages in the Times covered stories such as road accidents, the unexpected death of a prominent person, and the prices of bus fares and bread.

The Observer had a similar news agenda and on seven out of the 21 days both the Times and the Observer led the paper on the same story.

In the whole month there were only two stories that were about politics and both were in the Times.

During the month the Swazi News (which comes out on Saturdays) had four editions and three of them were about sex, which included one about a DJ and newsreader allegedly having sex in a radio studio, which I have written about before.

The Weekend Observer (another Saturday paper) also had four editions, two of these were ‘serious’ political stories, another story was about a minister being involved in a car crash and the fourth was about students forging their O-level certificates.

The Times Sunday had four editions and all the main stories could be called ‘serious’ to some extent. These included an attempt by ‘traditionalists’ in Swaziland to sack a High Court judge they disagree with; and the report of a police shooting a man in cold blood, which I have written about previously.

Although the front pages in the Times Sunday are serious, the inside pages rely heavily on sensationalism and trivia. It was the Times Sunday that published the articles describing gays as ‘evil’ and supporting the sexual harassment of women, which I have written about before.

What the survey of the front pages demonstrates, I think beyond any doubt, is that the Swazi newspapers are tabloid in form and in content.

So what should newspapers be like? A serious newspaper should do some or all of the following:

Examine what government is and is not doing
- Report and interpret the news
- Influence citizens’ opinions
- Provide space for rational debate
- Set agenda for government action
- Socialize citizens about politics
- Encourage a political culture to evolve

The Swazi press does hardly any of the above, a topic I’ll return to again in the future.



This is an edited and revised version of a presentation I made on Tuesday 11 September 2007 at the launch of the Tabloid Explosion at Highways Africa, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.

The Tabloid Explosion is published by Gender Links.