Televising South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: what liveness tells us about the commission;what the commission tells us about liveness

Abstract

Contrary to existing scholarship on the broadcasting of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this article argues that the televising of hearings did not constitute a ‘media event’, as defined by Dayan and Katz. Based on a qualitative analysis of the only two live broadcasts, a glance at viewership statistics and discussions with media personnel, the article attempts to uncover what media events can tell us about the Commission and what the Commission can tell us about the media events. The article argues that the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) decision to ‘go live’ – with the opening hearing and the broadcasting of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s testimony – demonstrates the ways in which the controversial amnesty provision provided loopholes that altered the original expectations of the Commission’s work over time, leading to the African National Congress’s (ANC) eventual dissociation from it. Additionally, the article argues that complex, unpredictable and contested content – usually the subject of national commissions of inquiry – is unsuited to the media event genre.