On 19 October 1977, the apartheid regime needed censorship, police cells and banning orders to silence the Black press.
Today, the state does not need to lift a finger. We are muting ourselves – for the right price – trading the fires of Black Wednesday for corporate insulation.
Let us stop hiding behind the self-congratulatory myth of the “veteran” journalist. It is time to ask the uncomfortable question we avoid at media galas: Did you leave the newsroom because your passion died, or did you simply trade your investigative fire to become a corporate spin doctor?
We have allowed a generational crisis that the Wits Centre for Journalism calls “juniorisation” to hollow out our media. As legacy advertising collapsed under pressure from global tech monopolies, retrenchments followed. Senior reporters abandoned the public interest to write glossy press releases and manage reputational crises for the highest bidder.
What they left behind are decimated newsrooms staffed by underpaid, overworked graduates. These young reporters are expected to feed a chaotic 24-hour digital content machine that has been stripped of rigorous sub-editing, institutional memory and the verification mentorship required for democratic oversight.
We boast endlessly about transformation and “Black bosses”, yet the reality remains tethered to untransformed capital.
The SANEF Independent Inquiry into Media Ethics and Credibility laid the systemic failure bare: structural financial distress has opened the floodgates to owner interference, corporate capture and political factionalism.
In a desperate scramble to survive, media houses have spent decades competing to become favourites of corporate gatekeepers. Outlets chase affluent audiences to secure advertising spend, systematically marginalising and abandoning the socio-economic realities of the township and the village.
True media freedom was never just about changing the skin colour of investors at the top; it was about building an editorial standard that refuses to bow to any master’s balance sheet.
So before you demand respect as an elder of this craft, answer this: What structural mechanisms have you actually implemented to change, build or protect the journalism fraternity in South Africa?
If your legacy is simply surviving long enough to secure a lucrative corporate communications escape hatch, you are not a veteran of the truth. You are a passenger who looted the ship before it sank.
PHALANE MOTALE IS A FORMER EDITOR, HE WRITES IN HIS PERSONAL CAPACITY.
