The effectiveness of the South African government news agency known as SA NEWS as a tool for government communication in South Africa

Abstract

The South African government uses Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) as a platform in which to interact with the public. As Pasquier (2012) defines it, this is a process where government shares information with the public in order to promote public participation while maintaining social bonds. To get government messages across with ease and as wide as possible, the South African government, under the Government Communication and Information System established a South African Government News Agency known as SA NEWS in 1998. Department of Communication (2012) postulates that through this agency, government was able interact with its citizenry in a manner that was under government’s total control. According to GCIS (2005), after SA NEWS was established, it saw an increased utilization of its services by many community and mainstream media. However, this seems to have steadily decreased in recent times. According to Mona (2020), this emerged after media fraternity began to realise that the news agency was only peddling propaganda. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to establish the effectiveness of this agency as a tool for government communication. That is, is it still providing the services which it intended to provide from the beginning? The theoretical framework of this study is effective government media relations. Therefore, part of the study focused on media-state relations. In this case, City Press, Sunday Times and SA NEWS became primary role players. In search of relevant data, a mixed method approach was utilized where participants from both newspapers in question and those from the government news agency were interviewed. A content analysis process was also undertaken, where 200 articles from both newspapers in question were collated and analyzed. Tones, themes and news values were also used to proper analyze the articles. The study concludes thus, that there is indeed room for improvement for the agency to be effective in its operations. This is especially due to the introduction of social media, amongst many other reasons. Social media extends the avenue through which SA NEWS may directly access citizens without the mediation of the media fraternity. Added to this is the decision taken by the agency to remove stringers in provinces and most importantly, the name change from Bua News to SA NEWS, which exposed the agency purely as a propaganda tool. In terms of media state relations, data indicates that there is still a lot of gaps between the two, with instances where journalists are threatened with sanctions, while media houses are denied advertising.