Features

Squelching to court through a quagmire

In the heavily prescriptive television industry, one has to admire the effort Icasa puts into its regulations. It can`t be easy. But one sometimes wonders: why, oh why?

01 February 2008

Several recent developments in the broadcasting sector are worthy of attention, even if each serves only to expose a fundamental failing in our telecommunications law. Three that caught my attention in the last couple of months are the ANC's call for the SABC to be more tax-funded and less advertising-driven, the suit Black Entertainment Television (BET) is bringing against Icasa over its award of five pay-television licences (it didn't get one), and the demand by the SABC that pay-TV operators pay it for content they are required to carry (they don't want to).

The ANC is quite right. One of the most damaging aspects of the SABC's historical dominance of the broadcasting space is its reliance on advertising for funding. A public broadcaster, if such a thing is necessary in the first place, should have a specific public service mandate and should be funded by public money. TV licences are a regressive, clumsy and expensive method of generating insufficient revenue. By selling advertising, the SABC sucks a large proportion of potential revenue out of the market, which could sustain competing broadcasters. Diverting available spending to the state is an implicit threat to media freedom, diversity, quality and specialisation.

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