Abstract
More than 20 years after the demise of Apartheid, South African journalists are still in the process of determining their own “journalistic ideology” according to a “Global South” approach. Various scholars argue that this approach should be anchored in African values and philosophies (such as Ubuntu), and take the unique South African context into consideration. In this article, the author has identified certain issues that could influence a reporter’s “journalism ideology”, such as education and training, newsroom routines and the role of the audience. She used these issues as a starting point for open-ended interviews with producers that create and edit content for the Current Affairs shows on RSG, one of the public radio stations at the South African Broadcasting Corporation.1 The media forms part of a network of shifting power relations and in a country where many of its citizens live under the breadline, radio still wields a huge amount of influence. Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model is used as theoretical framework informing the type of questions the author asks in her qualitative interviews, as she also regards media practitioners’ performance and actions as being strongly influenced by “the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate”.