What a week of missed opportunities!

It was an unfortunate week of missed opportunities[1] for Daily Sun, Sunday Sun and The New Age where these publications failed to access the very children at the centre of an astounding eight stories that focused on various children’s issues.   

To start, Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) notes three articles that focused on different types of youth-oriented initiatives aimed at uplifting young learners either through the donation of various products or through mentoring and empowerment programmes. None of the children in the articles were interviewed. They are: “It’s a girl thing!” Sunday Sun (18/02/2018, p. 8); “Giving back girls’ dignity” The New Age (21/02/2018, p. 19) and “Pupils get school uniforms to help them focus on education” The New Age (21/02/2018, p. 5). These are followed by two sports-related stories that focused on the Under-17 women’s football team, Bantwana, who had recently qualified for the 2018 Fifa Junior Women’s World Cup namely, “Bantwana qualify!”, Daily Sun (19/02/2018, p. 23); and “Jordaan: SAFA backs Bantwana” Daily Sun (20/02/2018, p.24).

There were also two stories that focused on ongoing protests or shutdowns at two separate South African schools that perpetuated this pattern including “School shut for three weeks” (The New Age, (23/02/2018 p. 5) and “Battle is still on!” Daily Sun (20/02/2018, p. 4).

Finally, Daily Sun’s “Pupils pitch up at the cop shop!” (22/02/2018, p. 33) also missed an opportunity to access children in a story about young pupils visiting a police station and learning about various aspects of police life.

While MMA commends these publications for the great strides that they have taken to cover a wide range of child-related issues – from school infrastructure concerns all the way through to upcoming female soccer stars – it remains a critical oversight and indeed a great pity that none of these stories sought to access the very groups that are the focus of the articles i.e. the children themselves. These articles evidence a general trend in mainstream media in which children remain continually under-accessed and their voices remain persistently marginalised[2], despite their being mentioned in the stories.

While we ask that journalists remain vigilant and sensitive in the ways that they pursue children’s views on specific topics (see Editorial guidelines and Principles on Reporting on Children in the Media[3]), we would emphasise here too that not accessing children not only fundamentally undermines their capacity to contribute to conversations about issues that affect them but also diminishes the quality of the story itself. Children have a wealth of opinions, ideas and visions that often reflect far more nuanced and complex approaches than adults. Their views should therefore be actively sought out not only to share with a wider audience, but also to add to the richness of the article.

We would therefore call on these publications to reflect on how they approach the children in their stories, and rather than neglecting their voices, to intentionally and continuously seek out children’s voices when it is demonstrably in their best interests to do so.

By Sarah Findlay   

[1] A missed opportunity is a story in which children were not accessed when they could have been.

[2] http://54.217.43.239/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Childrensreport2016web.pdf

[3] http://54.217.43.239/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/mma_editorial_guideline.pdf