Parliament - Government and the SABC will co-operate to create broadcasting material that seeks to counter xenophobia, Communications Minister Faith Muthambi on Wednesday told Parliament’s standing committee on communications.
“With regard to the xenophobic and Afrophobic attacks that we have been experiencing … we will be training stations, especially young journalists on producing content that will be dealing directly with issues of immigration, job creation, crime and unemployment amongst others.
“SABC will be our main partner because of the capacity it has in terms of writers and production facilities,” the minister said.
“We are serious when we say attacks should not happen in our name and we say no, no, no to them. We will also rope in Brand SA to that regard.”
Government announced on Tuesday that it was deploying the army to help police curb deadly attacks on foreigners that erupted in Durban three weeks ago before spreading to Gauteng. After drawing criticism for an initial slow response to the attacks, government also said it would take a range of steps to address anti-foreign sentiment in communities, including visits by all ministers and their deputies.
Muthambi was briefing the committee about the department’s efforts to enhance community broadcasting and said government saw its active involvement in the field as providing the poor with information, for example advertisements for jobs in the civil service.
“We have also taken a political decision with regards to the percentage of advertising spend that has to go to the community media.
“Our support for community media is unwavering, with our R36 million of government advertising allocated to community media.”
She said the department would hold discussions along with state information service GCIS and provincial premiers to ensure that this form of financial support from government does not only come from national departments.
“We will engage with premiers so that the spending is also determined from that level down, it will not only be national departments doing that. We want to unblock all problems.”
Muthambi said given the finalisation of government’s digital migration policy she was enlisting the SABC to produce digital content for groundroots media outfits to produce digital content.
Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape already had the capacity to produce digital content but the national broadcaster had been instructed to “look at producing content for provinces throughout the country” and would be setting up provincial production hubs to increase the rate at which material is generated in readiness for the switch from analogue to digital broadcasting.
ANA