It’s time to slaughter the sacred cow that “public broadcasting” seems to have become. The concept was invented in principle in the 1930s by the austere Sir John Reith, founder of the BBC. He laid down that the national broadcaster’s role was “to inform, educate and entertain” — which remains the BBC’s official mission in 2009, and has influenced many other national broadcasters, including SA’s.
But nothing stays the same. The BBC’s radio newsreaders are no longer obliged to dress in a dinner jacket to deliver the evening bulletin, as Reith insisted, and in the digital age broadcasting has changed radically. The scandalous financial mismanagement at the SABC (see Cover Story) obscures a hard reality. Underneath the incompetence and corruption at the broadcaster lies a business model that is deeply flawed, politically fraught and self-contradictory.
