Accumulation by symbolic dispossession: the Digital Terrestrial Television transition in South Africa

Using a critical political economy perspective, this article focusses on the migration from analogue to Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) in South Africa. Drawing on relevant international examples, it explores whether South Africa’s regulator is realising one of the major promises of the DTT transition, namely, to create more media diversity in the television sector. It analyses decisions taken by the communications regulator in allocating the digital multiplexes and whether these are contributing to broadening the public sphere. Sadly, in spite of the promise that the transition held, there are signs of it leading to reduced diversity and an upward redistribution of spectrum to upper-income brackets. Commercial broadcasting has become even more dominant than it was in the analogue space, which has intensified what Robert Horwitz has called a ‘commercialising juggernaut’ in television. These developments risk turning the country’s policy of three tiers of broadcasting – already under strain – into a policy in name only. Working class audiences that rely on public service television especially are being dispossessed of spectrum, depriving them of the resources necessary to speak to and be heard by mass audiences. The article asks why the DTT transition has come to this, and in attempting to answer this question, it critiques dominant theories of regulatory behaviour (including critical ones) as being overly structuralist in approach and not taking sufficient account of the agency needed to bring about a decommodified television system where the power to make symbolic resources is not determined by wealth.