Whose voice counts? Examining community media's coverage of South Africa's 2024 elections
Media Monitoring Africa (2025), 19 pp.
Contains 17 figures
"Community media published a total of 774 election-related stories: 583 from the six monitored radio stations and 191 from the 15 online and newspaper publications. This coverage was significantly lower than that of the SABC, which published 5,020 stories, and privately-owned media, which produced 6,859 stories during the same period. Findings from the SABC and other news media have been analysed into two separate reports. The limited coverage by community media is likely due to resource constraints and other challenges. While this is not a direct comparison, it highlights the significant disparity in election reporting between community and larger media outlets. Among community media, Alfred Nzo had the highest number of election-related stories, followed by Radio Khwezi. In contrast, Sekgosese Voice, Sivubela Intuthuko, Die Hoorn, and Pondo News had the least coverage. Radio was the dominant platform for election reporting, accounting for 75% of all election-related stories in community media." (Findings, page 4)
"The period of monitoring of community media for the 2024 National and Provincial Elections is from April 1 to June 28, 2024. This period was selected to analyse elections coverage prior and post voting day on May 29. We monitored 21 South African community media outlets, including print, online, and broadcast platforms. These included six radio stations with three daily news bulletins (morning, afternoon, and evening), and 15 newspapers published in both print and online formats. The monitoring was conducted in five provinces namely, Gauteng, Western Cape, Limpopo, Kwa-Zulu Natal and Eastern Cape. A total of five languages, English, Afrikaans, IsiXhosa, IsiZulu and Tshivenda were monitored." (Methodology, page 1)
