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Category: Race, Xenophobia and Ethnicity [REMOVE]
- The Citizen reinforces racial stereotypes
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The Citizen’s article “World Cup blasts: toll tops 74” (The Citizen, 13/07/2010, p. 10) has given Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) many reasons to be mad. The report identified a child, used an extremely graphic photo of dead victims, and reinforced racial stereotypes.
- Beeld inflames tense situation
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Beeld’s article “Klag kom ná k-woord” (05/03/2010, p. 5), by Hilda Fourie and Sonja Carstens, violates children’s rights and sensationalises violence by children. The article revolves around a classroom fight, access to cell phone footage of which has been provided. It is not clear what journalistic purpose this serves and seems salacious. The story identifies the children involved and the school they attend, while criminal charges have been laid. There is a race component to the story, yet insufficient care has been taken to minimise harm.
- Children’s Views Not in the News: Portrayal of Children in South African Print Media 2009
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Monitoring conducted by Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) in 2003 as part of the Empowering Children & the Media (ECM) strategy showed that only 6% of all news included children. The latest data to emerge from the ECM reveals that representation of children has improved, marginally, to 8.4% of all news monitored in 2009. The monitoring shows that not only are children’s issues frequently sidelined, but un-careful and unethical reporting often leads to further violations of their rights.
- Race and Migration in the Community Media: Local stories, common stereotypes
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In South Africa, racism and xenophobia, widely recognised as human rights violations, are particularly pertinent. A long history of institutionalised racism, most recently apartheid, saw the classification, segregation and discrimination of people along racial lines. It has shaped perceptions, attitudes, identities, and relationships, and left a legacy of inequality. In May 2008, xenophobia came starkly to the public’s attention, in the form of violence targeted at perceived “foreigners”, making local, national and international headlines. However, negative and discriminatory attitudes and behaviour towards migrants, or xenophobia, have long been documented as widespread and problematic in South Africa. Black immigrants in particular are victims of xenophobic attitudes and treatment.
For many South Africans, community and small commercial media are not only important sources of information for communities about issues affecting them, which may include racism and xenophobia, but also about “groups” of people that they may not come into contact with. While research has helped establish how the national and provincial media cover issues of race, racism, migrants and xenophobia, little information is available about coverage by community and small commercial media. To address this need, Media Monitoring Africa conducted research into how issues of race, ethnicity, migrants, racism and xenophobia are represented in community and small commercial newspapers.
- Election coverage 15 April 2009 - Sports and xenophobia
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Election coverage for Wednesday 15 April 2009 included a variety of different stories. However, the most prominent were stories about South African’s voting overseas. Although this was covered far more prominently on television, we are likely to see more coverage in the press tomorrow. An innovative elections story in The Star was tainted with xenophobic statements from a resident in an area recently affected by xenophobic violence. The statements were not contradicted.
- Election coverage 3 April 2009 - White Afrikaaners and Zuma
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The outstanding decision by the NPA on whether Jacob Zuma would face charges was discussed on Friday 3 April with much comment. However, most of this was not explicitly related to the election. The election coverage continued in much the same way as previous coverage, with top stories also revolving around the ANC and Zuma.
- Is media campaigning for ANC and COPE?: Election Report for week ending 28 March 2009
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While it is reasonable to expect the ANC as the ruling party to receive greater attention in news coverage, information that is useful to citizens for enabling informed participation has been few and far between. The coverage has in fact often appeared as an extension of Political Advertisements, and should therefore be far more limited in number and extent. This argument can also be extended to the attention received by other parties, with coverage exhibiting a bias towards the new party Cope at the expense of other more established parties.
- Election coverage 4 March 2009 - Shaik and Evita share the limelight
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Media Monitoring Africa has monitored every democratic election in South Africa. This year we are doing the same, providing daily and weekly reports on media coverage of election news, as well as MMA’s Election Media Ratings.
Top elections stories for Wednesday, 4 March are:
- Crime according to Beeld: Fear in Black and White
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Extreme news sells. Items that are different from everyday life, items that disturb people. Crime is therefore a good subject for newspapers’ front pages from a commercial point of view. Unfortunately, crime in South Africa is not just a creation of the national media. It is a very real problem. And although most statistics suggest decreasing figures, some specific forms of criminality have become more common.
- The picture that became a symbol for xenophobic violence
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A picture is worth a thousand words. And some of them have the power to encapsulate events and become the visual symbol for political or humanitarian situations. An example of this is the picture of Hector Pietersen being carried by his sister which became a symbol for the Sharpeville massacre. The image of a man who was set on fire that shocked South Africa and the world in the second week of the xenophobic violence has done the same for the recent xenophobic attacks. The Media Monitoring Project looks at the issues that this image raised for ethical journalism.
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