South African Media and Politics: Is the Three Models Approach Still Valid After Two Decades?

Citation

Jones B & Hadland A (2024) South African Media and Politics: Is the Three Models Approach Still Valid After Two Decades?. Media and Communication, 12 (Special Issue: Communication Policies and Media Systems: Revisiting Hallin and Mancini’s Model), Art. No.: 7723. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.7723

Abstract
When Hallin and Mancini (2004) produced their watershed Three Models theory, South Africa was a new democracy barely a decade old. Even then, along with other countries of the Global South, the experience of a young democracy posed certain critical challenges to Hallin and Mancini's understanding of the way that media and politics interrelate. Two decades later, South Africa has continued to change. There has been increased diversity in media ownership, rapid growth in community and social media, digital disruption, and significant challenges to media freedom. How does the Three Models theory stack up now? This paper reviews scholarly critiques of Hallin and Mancini's model, including their follow-up work, Beyond the Western World (2012), and assesses to what extent the Three Models is still a valid approach to understanding the connection between media and politics in the Global South. The paper concludes by evaluating Hadland’s (2012) Africanisation of the model in light of the complex postcolonial trajectories of South Africa, suggesting that this, along with Hallin, Mellado, and Mancini’s (2021) expanded hybridisation model, still offers a better set of variables with which to understand how the media and political systems intertwine in the postcolony.

Keywords
comparative media systems; democracy; Global South; South Africa; three models

Journal
Media and Communication: Volume 12, Issue Special Issue: Communication Policies and Media Systems: Revisiting Hallin and Mancini’s Model

People

Professor Adrian Hadland

Professor, Communications, Media and Culture

Dr Bernadine Jones

Lecturer in Journalism, Communications, Media and Culture