South African journalism is not dying — it is being murdered, and we know who holds the knife

The narrative that journalism is dying because of technology and changing reader habits is a convenient story for people who benefit from weak journalism. The truth is more specific and more uncomfortable. South African public interest journalism is being systematically defunded, not by indifferent readers, but by corporations and government entities who have concluded that advertising in newspapers that investigate them is not in their interest. When a major bank pulls its advertising from a publication that reports on its irregular lending practices, that is not a market signal. That is an editorial intervention. When a state-owned enterprise refuses to advertise in outlets that cover its procurement irregularities, that is not a business decision. That is an attempt to starve accountability journalism into silence. The journalists who remain are doing more with less than at any point in the democratic era. GroundUp operates on a fraction of what a single government communications contract pays. amaBhungane has exposed more state capture than the entire SARS communications budget could have predicted. The problem is not that readers do not value journalism. The problem is that the people journalism threatens have learned that the most effective form of censorship is financial, not legal.