26 April 2023,
According to Media Monitoring Africa (MMA), only 6% of media stories feature children. This was revealed at the launch of the 2022 State of Children in South African Media Report in Johannesburg, on Wednesday.
For the past 20 years, MMA has been monitoring media coverage of children to ensure compliance with ethical and legal guidelines.
The report shows that media coverage of children has dropped from 10% in 2021 to 6% in 2022. It further reveals that 45% of the time children are covered as victims, 12% as learners, 3% as survivors, and 2% as missing children.
MMA Program Manager, Lister Namumba says, “There were many findings, not all of them were good. In fact, the majority were not good because we still had a 6% representation of children in the stories, which is very little. We still had 8% of children speaking in coverage. There is also a focus on negative issues.”