‘TIMES’ CENSORS ADVERT ABOUT KING

The Times of Swaziland has censored a paid advert from a group of pro-democracy groups in the kingdom, because it contains mild criticisms of King Mswati III.

The advert drew attention to a recent rejection by the king of any dialogue with groups advocating democracy in the kingdom where he is sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.

The advert also commented on a statement made by the king’s brother Prince Mahlaba who made death threats against journalists who give coverage to political dissenters.

At first, the Times claimed the advert was illegal, but later privately accepted this was not the case.

What was happening, of course, was self-censorship by the newspaper. As I reminded readers earlier this week, the Times has had a series of run-ins with King Mswati and he has threatened to close down the newspaper group if it criticises him.

The pro-democracy groups who signed the advert were the Swaziland Democracy Campaign, the Foundation for Socio-Economic Justice, the Swaziland Coalition of Concerned Civic Organization, the Swaziland Democratic Front and Swaziland Positive Living (SWAPOL).

The advert runs for more than 800 words and there were significant changes made to four paragraphs. A reference to King Mswati acting in an ‘un-Swazi’ way was also cut.

The pro-democracy groups decided not to publish in the Times and will now try the Nation magazine, an independent monthly.

To see the original text of the advert and the changes demanded, click here or below.

Swaziland Advertisement Censorship

CENSORSHIP – ADVERTS AND LIBEL

I wrote last week about the research I had undertaken on censorship in the Swazi media.

My conclusion that journalists felt that King Mswati III was the biggest cause of imposed and self-censorship in Swaziland didn’t come as much of a surprise to media watchers.

But, I want to make clear that although the monarchy is the main concern among media people in Swaziland it is not the only cause.

My report, commissioned by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Swaziland chapter, also identified advertisers and the threat of libel action as significant worries.

Below is an extract from the report called The Existence of Censorship in Newsrooms. If you want a copy of the full report please email me at swazimedia@yahoo.com


Advertisers and financial interests of organisations

The threat of losing advertising is real, this is especially so as the economy of Swaziland is declining. The privately owned media is dependent on advertising to survive, and since a small number of organisations spend so much the media houses give serious consideration every time there is a complaint from an advertiser.

Some advertisers are so important to the newspapers that a special relationship exists between the advertiser and the advertising department. The advertising department knows that some advertisers will never say ‘no’ when approached to advertise. For example, if a newspaper is running a special themed advertising supplement, it might approach a regular advertiser to support it. If the advertiser has already spent the annual advertising budget, an advertisement would still be placed and the advertisement paid for at a later date, when funds are available to the advertiser.

A number of companies and organisations were specifically cited as organisations that regularly tried to censor the content of newspapers. They were Swazi Bank; the cellphone company, MTN (‘a definite no-go area’ and ‘you can’t write about blackouts in the service’); the Swaziland Electricity Company and Swaziland Posts and Telecommunications (SPTC).

All the foregoing are major companies or parastatals in Swaziland. But smaller companies are also given special treatment. One such company that was mentioned more than once by respondents was the Why Not (a recreation and entertainment venue). In the case of the Why Not, respondents said they did not even feel able to publish a poor review of an act that appeared at the venue, for fear of losing advertising.

Although media houses will keep stories about advertisers out of the media there is a limit to what they will not report. For example, one respondent said they would publish a story if a chief officer of an advertiser were accused of rape.

Newspapers do not fear the withdrawal of advertising by government, although, according to the African Media Barometer, published by MISA, this has happened in the past. It is felt that government has little choice but to use the newspapers in order to get information out to the general public (although state-controlled radio, SBIS is also available for this). One respondent said that in the past when the government did withdraw advertising it was done by one small part of government and the ban lasted about one week.

There was a minority view that advertisers did not cause problems for media houses because they understood that newspapers had a duty to publish. Advertisers were satisfied if the media house gave the advertiser a platform to give its side of the story.

Libel

Many respondents reported that hardly a day went by without somebody threatening to sue them in order to ‘scare them off’. A letter from a lawyer often accompanied these threats. There was a general feeling that some people who claimed that they had been libelled by the media were ‘trying it on’ to get the media house to agree on an apology and costs before the case got to court.

The great time delay in getting cases to court could intimidate media houses. One respondent said a case could take up to two years before it went to court. Another said that lawyers, acting like ‘ambulance chasers’, tried to keep a case going as long as they could. This guaranteed the lawyer an income, when lawyers had very few other opportunities to earn.

Media houses sometimes settled cases, even those where they believed they had not committed a libel, for fear of the huge costs involved. Libel insurance to protect media houses was becoming prohibitively expensive in a climate where claims for libel could be as high as E3 million.

This fear of the high cost if a case was lost has led to some stories being dropped or angles in stories being toned down.

Media houses often settled out of court to avoid the protracted hassle and possible costs of pursuing a case to court. One respondent said settling out of court was a dangerous move for media houses. ‘Once you settle, you open the floodgates for everybody else.’

Another respondent said, ‘Settling for fear of going to court has reduced the confidence of journalists and lowers the standards of journalism’. This led newspapers to only go for soft targets (people who could not sue) and to leave larger, more important, targets alone.

Sources

The media protect their own sources by not publishing harmful stories about them, but this protection is not total. Some respondents revealed that they would not publish the story in their own newspaper, but would pass it on to another newspaper in the same media house, for them to follow up.

Some respondents admitted to censoring stories about regular sources in order to ensure a future flow of stories from that source.

When a regular source wants to keep something out of the media, a certain amount of negotiation takes place. There were a number of examples given where a source – often an official spokesperson for an organisation – offered the media house a ‘juicier’ story in exchange for dropping a story that would reflect badly on the organisation that the journalist was working on.

Sources often get their way, and many respondents revealed that they were given ‘better’ stories in exchange.

Taboos and cultural traditions

Cultural traditions are said to be very important in Swaziland and there exists a duality in the legal system between constitutional law and cultural and traditional law.

Despite the apparent importance of culture, most respondents said that they did not allow traditional leaders to interfere with the media’s work.

Some respondents said that there are no real cultural traditions in Swaziland. ‘We don’t respect that cultural leaders are sincere,’ one respondent said.

Other comments included, ‘To Hell with culture – nobody has authority to challenge us.’ ‘Nobody’s practising culture in our country any more.’ ‘Women in the villages are only doing it for survival, they don’t really give a damn.’ ‘I’m here to break cultural taboos.’

The only area in which culture was respected by the media, concerned the King. There are a number of things that culture dictates cannot be reported about annual ceremonies concerning the King (e.g. the Reed Dance and Incwala) and the media (reluctantly, according to respondents) censored themselves. It was clear from respondents that there were many stories from the Reed Dance and Incwala that were known to the media, that they would like to publish, but did not, for fear of the consequences from the King.

See also
CENSORSHIP AND THE SWAZI MEDIA

ADVERTISERS DOMINATE SWAZI PRESS

If you need proof that Swaziland’s newspapers are more interested in pleasing advertisers than giving readers good journalism here it is.

Yesterday (1 July 2008) both of the kingdom’s two newspapers, the Times of Swaziland and the Swazi Observer gave up their entire front pages to an advert from cellphone provider, MTN, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the company’s presence in Swaziland.

The only way you could tell the difference between the two newspapers on the newsstands was by the newspaper’s title poking out of the top of the advert.

The Swazi Observer went one better than the Times by providing a full four-page wraparound for MTN. It had a front-page advert, a back page advert and two inside pages of photographs of MTN activities.

I’ve written before about the closeness of the newspapers (especially, but not only, the Observer) to MTN. The newspapers seem to uncritically report on MTN activities and seem to provide more space to the company than to any other organisation in Swaziland.

This leads to a suspicion that the newspapers do not objectively report on MTN because of an over-reliance on the company for advertising revenue.

The coverage is almost always excessively favourable and this could be a disservice to the people of Swaziland, especially when you recognise that MTN has a monopoly of the cellphone market in Swaziland.

Both newspapers yesterday also carried news reports of MTN’s launch of celebrations to mark its tenth anniversary. In both newspapers the ‘news reports’ are indistinguishable from public relations handouts.

Recently, I have been researching into censorship and self-censorship in the Swazi media by interviewing media practitioners about their experiences. I was told that because the Swazi economy is so small, some advertisers are so important to the newspapers that a special relationship exists between the advertiser and the advertising department.

In my report (to be officially launched this coming Friday) I say that a number of companies and organisations were specifically cited as organisations that regularly tried to censor the content of newspapers. Included in a list of companies which do this was MTN, described to me as ‘a definite no-go area’.

I have some sympathy with the accountants at the newspapers. Swaziland is so poor that the newspapers need to get their money wherever they can. But turning your newspaper into an advertising poster for a company is a step too far.

I was pleased to see the Times of Swaziland today (2 July 2008) asserting some editorial independence over MTN. It had two unflattering reports about the company.

The first reported that MTN’s celebration of ten years in operation was marred by a two-hour service blackout in Nhlangano.

The second concerned a revelation that MTN Caller Tunes for ring tones were not all recorded by original artists as customers believed. Instead, the tunes were ‘cover versions’ by unknown artists.

See also
NEWS AND ADVERTISING BLUR

ADVERTS FOR FAKE SWAZI NURSES

News that ‘fake’ nurses are operating in Swaziland raises questions about how advertisers in the kingdom are able to trick people.

The Swaziland Nurses Association (SNA) wants the Ministry of Health to set up a body to screen the content of adverts to make sure they are truthful.

The Times of Swaziland reported on Wednesday (5 March 2008) that the move from SNA follows the ‘mushrooming of clinics which advertise themselves in the media claiming they have medicine and herbs that cure HIV AIDS’.

SNA believes peoples’ lives are in danger as a result of advertisers who claim to be nurses but they are not.

The type of advertising the SNA complains of is not unusual in Swaziland. Unlike in other countries, such as neighbouring South Africa, there is no formal organisation in existence to oversee the quality of advertising and to issue code of regulations to advertisers. These codes help to ensure that misleading adverts do not get to see the light of day.

The Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa (ASASA) issues codes of conduct on all types of advertising. For example, an advertisement from a nurse claiming that drugs would ‘cure HIV AIDS’ would contravene a code that states ‘Advertising shall not contain improper, alarming or misleading claims of a recovery.’

Many adverts that you see every day of the week in Swaziland would not be allowed in South Africa.

As an example, in the same edition of the Times that carried the report from SNA, there was a large advert for a product called Oto ‘Super Powerful Man Tablets’.

Part of the advert has the following lines

Do you suffer from
- Low Sexual Drive
- Weak Erection
- Premature ejaculation.

It then offers ‘Be effective for 48 hours’ before going on to claim

- Safe and free of side effects
- Can be used by diabetics and
- People with high blood pressure.

‘The number one natural product for Sexual Vitality’

The advert breaks a number of ASASA regulations, including: ‘Advertising shall not contain improper, alarming or misleading claims of a recovery’ and ‘Advertising shall not claim, or imply, that a product’s effects are guaranteed.’

The call from SNA for some body to oversee advertising is one that deserves support. The advertising industry is very small in Swaziland because – frankly – people in the kingdom are so poor that they cannot afford the goods and services that advertisers want to sell to them.

It also deserves support because many people do not lead sophisticated lives and with relatively little formal education they do not have inquiring minds and are likely to take advertisers’ claims at face value.

There is also more than a hint of desperation involved too. Some people with HIV might desperately want a ‘cure’ and be willing to believe anything an unscrupulous advertiser might tell them.

And of course, who wouldn’t want to be ‘Super Powerful Man’ when it came to the Sexual Vitality Department?

CELEBRATING THE SWAZI LANGUAGE

This week is siSwati Week in Swaziland – an opportunity to celebrate Swaziland’s indigenous language.

The Times of Swaziland on Monday (18 February 2008) told readers it ‘joins the nation in celebrating our mother tongue’.

To show its commitment to the siSwati language, throughout the week it intends to publish some of the winning entries in a national schools siSwati writing competition.

Well, thanks very much Times of Swaziland, but it is being a little bit dishonest when it says how much it wants to celebrate the siSwati language. In November 2006 it closed down indefinitely the only newspaper in Swaziland in the siSwati language. It did this because the newspaper, called Tikhatsi TeMaswati, wasn’t making the African Echo, the company that owns the Times, any money.

Ever since its closure, people living in the rural areas of Swaziland (and that’s about 75 percent of the kingdom’s population of nearly one million people) have been asking for its return.

According to the African Media Barometer – Swaziland 2007 report, published by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Swaziland Chapter, Tikhatsi TeMaswati was a translation of articles already published in English in the Times. Had it carried original reports in siSwati it might have done better, the report stated.

It goes on to say that its main obstacle was attracting advertisers who assume people reading siSwati are poor and are, therefore, not worth advertising to.

That’s true. To make money a newspaper has to be attractive to advertisers. Just about every newspaper in the free world gets more of its income from selling advertising space than from the price people pay to buy it.

In Swaziland, about 70 percent of the population have an income of less than one US dollar a day (E7) and most of these people live in the rural areas. They have no money to spend so it follows that advertisers are not interested in them. If advertisers aren’t interested then a newspaper company is not going to make money by supplying poor people with a newspaper.

That’s how it works in Swaziland. The only newspapers published in the kingdom are in the English language and they circulate mostly in urban areas, which is where people with money live. Very few people in the kingdom are what you could call rich, but there are enough people with some money to attract advertisers.

Commercial companies whose only real interests are in making profits will not produce loss-making newspapers, even if there is a demand for them from poor people.

So, the Times can congratulate itself all it wants about supporting the siSwati language, but if it is genuine in this support it will open up Tikhatsi TeMaswati again.

LOVE IS IN THE SWAZILAND AIR

Love is in the air, according to the Times of Swaziland as it introduced an eight page Valentine’s Day supplement stuffed full of advertising on Tuesday (12 February 2008).

I don’t know if love is really in the air but a lot of people are definitively hoping that cash will be in the tills as the newspaper’s advertisers encouraged people to part with their hard earned money at restaurants, holiday destinations, beauty salons and (I don’t really get the connection here) used car lots.

Swazis keep going on about their culture and how superior it is to more developed countries so it comes as a huge surprise that every year come 14 February the old pagan custom of St Valentine’s is celebrated in the kingdom.

Of course, ordinary people don’t celebrate since about 70 percent of Swaziland’s near one million population live in abject poverty on an income of less than one US dollar a day (E7). – and advertisers aren’t interested in them because they’ve got no money to spend.

But the Times, a newspaper that doesn’t really care about ordinary Swazis, indulged its fantasy view of what Swaziland is like with gushing praise for this fancy restaurant and that romantic hotel. Each gush was accompanied by a paid-for advert.

But what exactly does the Times think are we celebrating on St Valentine’s Day? The Times believes it’s all about a man who in 269 AD was martyred because he refused to give up Christianity.

Not so, according to modern thinking.

Valentine’s Days has no relation to Saints. The Encyclopedia Britannica has St Valentine's Day as a lovers’ festival and the modern tradition of sending valentine cards has no relation to the saints but, rather seems to be connected either with the Roman fertility festival of Lupercus or with the mating season of birds.

This information is reiterated by the Encyclopedia Americana where the customs of Valentine’s Day have been handed down from the Roman festival of the Lupercalia, celebrated in the month of February, when the names of young women were put into a box and drawn out by men as chance directed. This is the origin of Valentine’s Day cards linking men and women together for sexual purposes.

My personal favourite explanation comes from Metro Magazine.

Metro says it all began with two ill-fated Romans - both named Valentine - who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, got executed and became Christian martyrs. The two Valentines lived in third-century Rome as out-of-the-closet Christians, sharing not only a name, but a death date – 14 February. Their cult was grafted onto the very popular Lupercalia festivities held every 15 February. During the pagan celebration, scantily clad young men called Luperci would run around town, sacrificing goats and playfully whipping women with goatskin thongs. Romans thought this behaviour would increase fertility, and no doubt it did.

So, Times of Swaziland, if you must celebrate St Valentine’s do it properly. Bring on the women, the scantily clad men …. And don’t forget the goatskin thongs.

SWAZI GOVERNMENT HITS ITS CRITICS

Government departments are punishing Swazi newspapers that write critical articles about them by withholding advertisements.

‘The government is the biggest single advertiser and wields enormous power in the small advertising market. Government regularly uses this power to control media content,’ it was revealed at a workshop held in Swaziland.

A panel of experts in the African Media Barometer workshop heard that censoring the news to protect advertisers has become increasingly common in Swaziland.

A report on the workshop reveals, ‘Recently the Ministry of Health ran a series of announcements in the Observer, but refused to run them in the Times. When the newspaper confronted the Ministry they said they withheld the advertisements because they were unhappy with the Times’ criticism of the Ministry over the public health crisis. The Observer has had similar experiences of government withholding advertisements on particular issues. This is not the result of top-level policy, but rather “just depends on which government department it is”’

Government departments can get away with this because the newspapers rely on advertising and a large proportion of that advertising income comes from the government. The advertising market in Swaziland is too small to sustain many media outlets. Government and parastatals are the big advertisers and if the were removed from the market, the media would barely survive. Advertising from private businesses is rare and ad hoc.

The report adds, ‘And since the government and parastatals are the biggest advertisers, this means information critical of government and public bodies can be withheld from the public.’

The workshop, which was held in July 2007, also heard that other advertisers are also protected by newspaper owners. The report states, ‘Recently the Times rejected an investigative piece that dug up dirt about a major advertiser.’ The owner of the Times made the editor shelve the article.

This kind of behaviour led the Media Institute of Southern Africa – Swaziland Chapter (MISA) to conclude that ‘media owners are more concerned about protecting their business than fighting for media freedom.’


See also

ADVERTISERS ‘CONTROL THE MEDIA’

BIG BROTHER SHOW CONS AFRICANS

Big Brother Africa 2 (BBA2), the ‘reality’ television show that went on and on and on for three months is finally over.

The Swazi media, particularly the newspapers and mostly the Times of Swaziland, got carried away by the show in which 12 young men and women were put together in a house, made to undertake tasks, had cameras watching them 24 hours a day, and then had viewers decide which ones of them they wanted to evict from the house. This went on and on for 98 days until there was only one ‘housemate’ standing. The winner got to go away with 100,000 US dollars (about 700,000 Swazi emalengeni).

Swazi journalists such as Nathi Gule, who writes a television review in the Times every Friday, thought BBA2 was the best thing since television was invented.

Although the media in Swaziland fell for BBA2, journalists elsewhere in Africa were more aware of that BBA2 was a confidence trick on ordinary Africans.

Daniel Soetan, writing last Saturday (17 November 2007) in the Nigerian newspaper Leadership, compared BBA2 with a previous ‘reality’ TV show called Gulder Ultimate Search. Soetan writes.

‘[Gulder Ultimate Search] was a TV Reality Show that x-rayed the true day-to-day life of average African people.

‘Gulder Ultimate Search was devoid of luxury, flamboyancy etc. No rooms fully air-conditioned, no gas cookers, and other quirths that an average African cannot afford.

‘How will you get an air-conditioner when your ordinary ceiling, standing or even table fan, as the case may be, would require generator to roll the blades?

‘What gas cooker? Can an average Nigerian afford it? My neighbours, even with the kerosene cooking stoves, still have to use charcoal burner to cook oftentimes. The poor family can’t cope with the hike in the price of kerosene.

‘In an hotel one day, during the early days of the just concluded Big Brother Africa, I watched the housemates testing the beautiful new clothes that had just been delivered to them by the organisers. Ask the participants of the Gulder Ultimate Search.

‘The BBA reality show, to an extent, suppresses the truth about the real African. How can you lock up some youths and have them live in a fake world? They briefly enjoy luxury, comfort, a high life style and rich nutritious food that some of them do not enjoy in their real world, only to evict them back into their real world of poverty and hustling.

‘They'll come out more angry, frustrated and aggressive than they went in with so much impatience and greed because they simply desire that it continues to be like it was in the Big Brother House.’

I agree with most of what Daniel Soetan writes but I think he misses an important point. BBA2 wasn’t meant to be about ‘average’ Africans. BBA2 went out on the satellite channel DSTV, a channel that most Swazis don’t watch because they can’t afford to. In Swaziland about 70 per cent of the population exist on less than one US dollar a day.

BBA2 is targeted at a very particular audience of young people. To be attractive to sponsors and advertisers the audience need to be in well paying jobs and have money to spend on the goods and services advertisers want to sell.

Advertisers who use television have trouble reaching younger adults, so BBA2 was aimed specifically at these kinds of people. BBA2 wants the audience to relate to the participants so they chose men and women to take part who come from a very narrow social demographic.

The 12 housemates ranged in ages from 21 to 30-years old, but most of them were aged 23 to 28. They didn’t have run-of-the-mill jobs in the real world. Two described themselves as ‘authors’, one was a model and actress, another was a fashion designer and yet another was a ‘radio personality’. This range of occupations is hardly typical of the average African.

Only countries with people who have money to attract advertisers were allowed to take part. Swazis were not invited to audition for a place in the house because not enough people in the kingdom subscribe to DSTV. Swazis are just too poor.

I’ll leave the final word for today on BBA2 to Ambrose Nuwagira, writing in the New Vision newspaper, Uganda.

‘What has this show portrayed? That life is all about manipulation, hypocrisy, and exploitation, whereby the most clinical in these will always win. This is a blatant lie.

‘To the African child, the biggest question in the last 98 days has been what can an African do for $100,000? The answers were just manifesting on the TV screens; hatred, envy, greed and infidelity.

‘There is absolutely nothing African about big brother.

‘Big brother is a sign of moral degeneration, greed, and gluttony. Africans have a sense of decency, shame, honour, dignity and moral sensibility. These are two contrasting situations. Now that they have broken the codes of decency, have made adultery look attractive and, of recent, portrayed fidelity as insignificant, what will be the next item on stage in an era where HIV/AIDS rates are increasing and vices like homosexuality trying to hold ground? Big Brother Africa portrays high corporate social irresponsibility and has offered our society a disservice.’

See Also

WATCHING BIG BROTHER

READING BIG BROTHER

ADVERTISERS ‘CONTROL THE MEDIA’

An article in the Swazi Observer on Tuesday (6 November 2007) accused advertisers of being able to decide what is and what is not published in Swaziland newspapers.

The writer Mfankhona Mkambule accused some (unnamed) companies of having formed strategic partnerships with certain media outlets. Mkambule says that since the advertisers bring in the money, media outlets are afraid to upset them in case they take the money away.

‘In this way’, he writes, ‘the media does not expose their dirty linen. They tolerate it with a smile. In most cases, those who bribe the media with advertisements have skeletons in their closet. In order for the media to paint a good picture of the goings-on behind the scenes, it is imperative for them to dangle a carrot – and the hungry media would rather compromise journalistic ethics than letting it go.’

Mkambule gives no evidence to support his claims, but I have written before about what I think is the too-close relationship between the mobile phone company MTN and the newspapers (especially the Swazi Observer).

There is a bigger issue here than just whether one advertiser or another is keeping ‘dirty linen’ out of the newspapers.

The argument that is missed by Mkambule is that mass media can play a vital role in achieving development goals and contributing to social change but in reality there is little incentive for privately owned media groups to create development-type material if this threatens profits or works against the interests of business interests that the media might have,

Mass media that operates in a capitalist economy rely on advertising revenue for profit and the way advertisers chose where to spend their money amounts to a political discrimination; this is because advertisers are more interested in reaching people who have money to buy things.

The main influence on spending is income: the rich buy more of most things than the poor. So, the media are more interested in writing stories or producing radio and television programmes that would be attractive to people with money to spend, and attractive also to advertisers who wish to sell their goods and services to them.

Advertising provides the principal financial backing for commercial mass media across the world. Just about every commercial newspaper in the world gets more of its income from running adverts than from the price readers pay to buy the paper.

In order to make sure the money keeps rolling in from advertisers (and in the case of the Swaziland newspapers, this includes advertising from the government) the media tend to protect and promote the interests of the big companies and government departments that advertise.

This is why the media tend to support the general ruling economic and political interests in a country and suppress alternate views. This means that the media are more interested in profit making than in giving out public information.

A major problem with advertising-dominated media is that to achieve profitability media companies must maximize audiences and they therefore prefer to provide entertainment rather than ‘public interest’ material.

If you look at the survey I did of Swazi newspapers you can see how this works. In the Swazi Observer and the Times of Swaziland, the combined ‘sport’ and ‘entertainment and leisure’ categories (the most entertaining material in the newspapers) equal 44 percent of total space dedicated to editorial in the Observer and 40 percent in the Times.

The small size of the advertising market in Swaziland, combined with a substantial government share of total advertising expenditure, poses major problems for press proprietors, editors and journalists. Apart from the more obvious problems of repression and censorship, governments are able to sway editorial policy and news coverage, and indeed put out of existence newspapers which are seen as contradicting or questioning government policy, simply through the withdrawal of essential advertising revenue.

Although there is a partly free press in Swaziland, newspapers are heavily dependent on government advertising and this places the Press in a difficult financial position if it tries to protect the public against bad government. There is a fear that newspapers cannot ask uncomfortable questions for fear of losing advertising revenue and instead reproduce public relations material on behalf of the government. It is difficult to judge whether this is happening in Swaziland at the present time, but my observations of recent articles, especially in the Times of Swaziland, is that the newspaper is not concerned on this point.

In his article, Mkambule reminds us that the former Swaziland Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini threatened to withdraw advertising from one newspaper if it continued to publish negative things about the Government. ‘The bone of contention was that government could not financially support a media house that turned around to bite the hand that feeds it,’ Mkambule wrote.

Mkambule calls on the Minister of Public Service and Information S’gayoyo Magongo to hold an inquiry into the relationship of advertisers and the media they support. Quite what form this inquiry should take he does not say. But the truth is that in a market orientated capitalist society those with the money will always enjoy greater power than does who do not.

WATCHING BIG BROTHER

On Sunday I saw some people having a meal (scrambled eggs, I think) and then one man poured himself a glass of water and drank it. Later, someone else took a broom and swept the floor of the kitchen while some others sat in the garden.

No, this wasn’t a typical Sunday at the Rooney homestead; this was a day in the life of Big Brother Africa 2 (BBA2).

BBA2 is the new ‘reality television’ show broadcast by satellite company, DSTV.

For those of you who have real lives of your own and haven’t been paying attention, BBA2 put 12 ‘housemates’ together in a house, locked them away from the world, and has had cameras following them for 24 hours a day.

Sunday was day 42 of their exploits. The series is scheduled to run for a total of 98 days.

From time to time, viewers are asked to nominate one of the housemates for eviction from the house. This goes on until viewers have voted everybody except one person off and that person is then declared the winner. The winner gets to go away with 100,000 US dollars (700,000 Swazi emalengeni).

This is only the second time that Big Brother Africa has been broadcast, but the programme format is not new. It started in the Netherlands in the1990s and local versions of the programme have been broadcast around the world since. It is now one of the most successful programme formats in the history of television.

Back in the 1990s, the programme makers made all kinds of claims for Big Brother. They said it was a social experiment to see how people would react to living so closely to one another without a break and for such a long period. Sociologists and psychologists rushed to praise the programme for its intellectual insights.

Nobody seriously says that kind of thing now. It didn’t take too long before the truth came out. The reality of this ‘reality television’ programme was money. That’s why it’s taken so long for Big Brother to get as far as Africa: there’s not much money to be made on this continent.

Here’s how it works. The BBA2 programme makers wanted 12 contestants from across Africa. Instead of auditioning people across the continent and taking the best people they could find they decided to look only in Africa’s richer nations. They didn’t bother to come to Swaziland.

BBA2 found its 12 contestants – with no more than one person from any single country so they could spread the interest in the programme around the continent. Countries represented include South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Botswana.

BBA2 is targeted at a very particular audience of young people. To be attractive to sponsors and advertisers the audience need to be in well paying jobs and have money to spend on the goods and services advertisers want to sell.

Advertisers who use television have trouble reaching younger adults, so BBA2 was aimed specifically at these kinds of people. BBA2 wants the audience to relate to the participants so they chose men and women to take part who come from a very narrow social demographic.

The 12 housemates range in ages from 21 to 30-years old, but most of them are aged 23 to 28. They don’t have run of the mill jobs in the real world. Two describe themselves as ‘authors’, one is a model and actress, another is a fashion designer and yet another is a ‘radio personality’. This range of occupations is hardly typical of the average African.

The cell phone company MTN sponsors the programme and must be rubbing its hands all the way to the bank because the other way they make money is by getting the television audience to send SMS text messages.

If you want to vote to evict a housemate you send an SMS message. If you SMS from Swaziland it’ll cost you 50 US cents (about E3.50). The other moneymaking scheme is to get viewers to SMS messages that get published on screen. Again, an SMS from Swaziland will cost you 50 US cents.

To get the messages flowing and to incite interest, BBA2 has manufactured conflict within the house. By clicking OK on screen you are taking to a ‘news’ centre where you can catch up on what’s been going on in the house for the past 40-odd days. Here you learn that the housemates have fallen out with each other and there are now two opposing camps who are fighting with one another.

Also, a couple (one male and one female) are said to be getting a bit hot and have been kissing and nuzzling one another.

On the afternoon I watched, these two pieces of ‘news’ excited most of the text messages. There was a constant stream of messages (at E3.50 a time) and as far as I noticed none of them were repeated.

So the companies behind BBA2 are making a lot of money out of this programme, but as viewers what are we getting? On Sunday, I switched off after an hour or so and went to read a book. When I switched back on an hour or so later, there was a man and a woman in the kitchen boiling a pan of water. Maybe it was time for tea.

When I lived in Papua New Guinea I watched a TV programme called Haus and Home where they showed viewers how to decorate a wall in your house by painting it. We then spent some time watching the paint dry.

Why did I suddenly remember that? ….

NEWS AND ADVERTISING BLUR

The launch of a new cellphone product last week raises ethical issues about the blurring of the lines between news and advertising.

On Friday (24 August 2007) both the Times of Swaziland and the Swazi Observer newspaper had front page lead stories about the launch by cellphone company MTN Swaziland of a new service that offers subscribers reduced rates. The package was described by the company as the first of its kind in the world.

Although both newspapers considered this launch to be so important to warrant making it the main news report of the day, the Observer went a long way further by also devoting two inside pages to the news.

Devoting three pages of a 36-page edition of the Observer to a commercial story might raise doubts about the news values at newspaper, but that is not what concerns me at the moment. The real issue is that the Observer chose to highlight the headlines on the two pages in the shade of yellow that MTN uses in its corporate logo. In addition, there were five pictures on the two pages, all with the MTN logo prominent, and in total there were at least 25 people shown wearing MTN T-shirts and caps, all in the corporate colour and all with company logos.

The importance that the Observer placed on the story can be judged by the fact that all the reports on the product launch were written by the Observer chief editor, Musa Ndlangamandla. The reports extensively quoted MTN company members saying how special the new product was. It was often referred to as a ‘world first’.

In case you were wondering, this ‘world first’ referred to a tariff programme that allowed Pay As You Go customers to get already existing cheap rates anytime of the day and not just at specific times. As ‘world firsts’ go this is pretty small beer.

Despite the use of the MTN corporate colour and all the pictures of the T-shirts and caps, this report was not an advertisement. It was journalism: albeit pretty lousy journalism.

There is something going on between MTN and the Observer. Only the previous Monday (20 August 2007) the Observer devoted another two pages (in the corporate colour yellow and with 11 pictures of people in those T-shirts and caps) about MTN. This time the report was about the start of MTN’s 21-day corporate responsibility programme during which staff visited a hospital and helped to clean up the grounds.

So, in the space of five days the Observer has given five pages to MTN. There is no evidence to suppose that MTN has made any payment for this space, rather it seems they are being given a massive free advertisement.

The saga of MTN and the Observer is important because in the Swazi press generally there is a blurring of the line between what is news and what is promotion or advertising.

There is a strong tradition in newspapers and magazines across the world of offering companies and organizations the opportunity to pay for favourable editorial content to be placed in their publications. This kind of editorial is sometimes known as advertorials, advertising features or supplements. Whatever you call them, they are all stories that provide direct support to advertisers.The ethical problem arises if the publication does not make it clear to readers that they are reading paid-for ‘sponsored’ editorial, rather than freely written, independent journalism.

Advertorials are advertisements (text and pictures occupying paid-for space), pretending to be independent editorial content. They exist because they can make money for publishers. Advertisers like them because editorial in newspapers is trusted more than adverts. However, the same argument is used by people who oppose them. Many times, the readers do not know that what they are reading lacks the credibility of editorial matter. The media in such cases choose not to clearly state the fact of an advertorial being one.

One piece of research conducted in India discovered that only eight people in a sample of forty were able to distinguish between independent editorial content and advertorials, suggesting that the media often choose not to clearly state paid-for text as being just that.

The example of MTN and the Observer blurs this line a little since it would appear that the Observer willingly gave MTN space that gave direct support to MTN, offering uncritical coverage of its product launch, using the corporate colours and publishing pictures of company T-shirts and caps with MTN logos. They did all this but there is no evidence that the Observer took money from the company for all this publicity.

But there are other examples in the Swazi press where advertorials or supplements are published without it being made clear to readers that what they are reading has been paid for by advertisers. Two recent examples of this are the three-page supplement on the refurbishment of Thokoza Church Centre dining facilities (16 August 2007) and the two-page Pre-School Supplement (23 August 2007): both published by the Times of Swaziland.

Unless, newspapers are trying deliberately to mislead their readers they should take as much care as possible to distinguish between paid-for editorial and independent editorial. To reduce the confusion they can do the following:

- Label all paid-for editorial in one of the following ways: ‘Advertisement’, ‘Advertising feature’ ‘Advertising supplement’. It is important to get the word ‘Advertising’ or ‘Advertisement’ in there somewhere so there can be no doubt that what is published is not independent journalism.

- Use a different type face for headlines and body text in advertorials and supplements. This will make the paid-for material look different from independent editorial.

- If reporters who generally write independent editorial for the newspapers have been assigned to write advertorials do not put the report’s name (by-line) on the advertorial. In this way readers who recognise the reporter’s name will not mistake the piece for independent journalism.