Post-apartheid South Africa continues to face challenges in its attempts at economic transformation from decades of apartheid and colonisation. This need for revolution has resulted in various policy initiatives, including the ongoing demands for the nationalisation of the economy. The commercial media has a central role in shaping policy debates. But this media is an ideological tool and an economic resource since it is owned and controlled by people with political and economic interests and, therefore, tends to support and promote their interests. This book provides a Marxist critique of the representation of the nationalisation of the mines debate by the South African commercial media. Radebe examines corporate control of the media to articulate the interrelations between the State, Capital and the Media and how commercial media represents, shapes and influences public policy. He concludes that beyond factors such as ownership, commercialisation and the influence of advertising on news content, the global capitalist hegemony has a more powerful effect on the commercial media in South Africa than previously thought. Print edition not for sale in Sub Saharan Africa.

This book critically explores how meanings of ‘independence’ are constructed and reconfigured by public service broadcasters in the global south, with a particular focus on the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). Blessed Ngwenya questions the institutional, political economy and world systems paradigms born out of coloniality which continue to influence broadcasting and media in the global south, and instead presents a radical local understanding of freedom in the present day. The author draws on detailed empirical interviews with members of staff from across the SABC, including board members, senior management, and journalists, offering an intimate insight into how the participants themselves perceive, understand, and deal with the issues and problems they face in relation to independence. Framed by a rich analysis of the historical context, this book provides readers with the theoretical and empirical toolkit needed to place the everyday experiences and needs of their subjects first, and to ultimately arrive at an accurate understanding of independence in its several senses. Contributing to growing global debates on the decolonisation of knowledge, this book is critical reading for advanced scholars and researchers of African media, culture, communication and epistemic freedom.

This title was first published in 2000: An original explanation for the importance South Africans attachment to ethnic and racial group categories in everyday speech and practice. The answers emerge by presenting a history of dominant and resistance discourses as they relate to collective identity - a move which breaks with prevailing approaches to South African political history, problematises ethnic group categories and offers new ways of seeing old debates.

Media, Ideology and Hegemony provides what Raymond Williams once called the "extra edge of consciousness" that is absolutely essential to create, both on and offline, a better, more open, more equitable, and more democratic world.