South Africa’s free press has been largely successful in resisting efforts by the Chinese government to influence its content, analysts say, citing a recent study by the US-based Freedom House think tank.
“In South Africa, we have a deep historical suspicion of state media,” said Anton Harber, a journalism professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
South Africa’s wariness of state media, he said, stems from the country’s legacy of apartheid, the longstanding state policy of racial segregation and discrimination that ended in 1994. Under apartheid, the media was censored.
“The SA media is resilient and will always be skeptical when it comes to certain topics that mold into a certain line of thought,” said Reggy Moalusi, executive director of the South African National Publishers Forum.
The Freedom House report, titled “Beijing’s Global Media Influence in 2022,” said South Africans as a whole, including journalists, are highly skeptical of Chinese state narratives. He said that despite the Chinese government’s success in building ties with the ruling African National Congress party, “coverage of China in the South African media remains generally diverse… and often critical of the Chinese government.”
Areas of concern
Even with a democratic government and a free press, the Chinese government still tries to influence South Africa’s media environment, according to the 2022 findings of Freedom House, which has studied China’s media influence in 30 countries around the world since January 2019. until December 2021.
StarTimes Group, a private Chinese company with ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has invested 20 percent in local satellite provider StarSat, which provides TV channels for Chinese state media, according to the report.
Another example cited in the report is South Africa’s Independent Media group, which publishes some 20 newspapers in the country. Since 2013, the group has been 20 percent owned by a Chinese consortium whose shareholders include state media. Its digital version, Independiente en Línea, is the second most read news site in the country.
Independent Media regularly publishes content from the Chinese news service Xinhua, as well as insights from the Chinese state. “None of your outlets publish a lot of negative comments about China,” Freedom House said.
The company’s media published 16 articles, interviews and speeches by China’s ambassador and consul general between 2020 and 2021, according to the report. It also gives print space to local South African academics and political figures who support the Beijing line.
Your foreign editor wrote an op-ed during the pandemic with false claims about the origins of COVID-19. Independent media journalists have attended press trips to China, and one independent journalist told Freedom House investigators that the Chinese embassy sometimes directly provides the topics of articles and related links.
An example of China’s apparent influence on independent media occurred in 2018 when columnist Azad Essa was abruptly fired after writing an article condemning Beijing’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims.
When contacted by VOA for comment, the group’s editor-in-chief, Aziz Hartley, responded: “Editors have complete autonomy over their respective publications and their reporters are bound by the principles of unbiased, ethical and factual reporting.” .
China’s efforts to influence the media landscape in South Africa were shown to have slowed down in recent years, according to the report.
The other side
Shao Hesong, second secretary of the Chinese embassy in Washington, referred questions to the Chinese embassy in South Africa, which did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In a July op-ed published by state media chinese newspaper, Dennis Munene, executive director of the Nairobi-based China-Africa Center at the Africa Policy Institute, advocated for greater cooperation between China and African media.
Under the Chinese government’s China-Africa Vision 2035 program, he said, China and Africa “plan to strengthen cooperation in news coverage, audiovisual content creation, training of media professionals and media technologies.” He argued that there is a need for “deeper media exchanges” and said Beijing “can develop technological tools to verify facts on issues related to Sino-African relations.”
Findings from Africa
While South Africa is highly resilient against Chinese government influence due to its diverse media landscape, the study found that the other African nations studied were mixed.
“Our investigation found that Beijing is trying some of the same tactics in Africa as it is in Western countries, such as signing content-sharing agreements, paid infomercials, or publishing ambassadorial op-eds,” Angeli Datt, senior research analyst at Freedom House, he told VOA.
In Nigeria, China’s attempts to influence were “very high”, the fourth highest of the 30 countries surveyed, and while there was some resilience, it was less robust than in the other three. The Chinese embassy in Nigeria has reportedly contacted editors and even paid journalists not to cover the negative stories, according to Freedom House.
In Kenya, there were “high” efforts by China to influence the media, but the East African country also had a “remarkable” level of resilience. For example, a Chinese state-owned company threatened to sue a Kenyan newspaper, The Standard, for its investigative reporting on abuses on a company-operated railway. The newspaper refused to retract the story, and the Chinese embassy canceled its advertising with the newspaper.
Global media influence
Of the 30 countries studied around the world, Beijing’s efforts to influence the media were rated “high” or “very high” in 16 of them, with only half of those surveyed found to be resistant to the messages, the other half vulnerable.
“The Chinese government, under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, is accelerating a massive campaign to influence the media and news consumers around the world,” the report said.
