The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) over his comments about Charlie Kirk reminds us that even within the supposed bastions of liberal democracy the boundaries of free speech, editorial independence and media power remain fiercely contested.
It followed after Kimmel, in his show on September 17, criticised the Republican response to Kirk’s killing, accusing the “Maga gang” of exploiting it for political gain.
Under pressure from ABC affiliates, the Federal Communications Commission chair and concerns over advertiser backlash and staff safety, the ABC and owners Disney chose the move to avoid further controversy and regulatory consequences.
However, the backlash came from the public and other talk-show hosts. The suspension was lifted on September 22, with Jimmy Kimmel Live! returning the following night to most ABC affiliates.
This incident is precisely what makes the article by the High Level Panel on Public Interest Media — “Decline of public interest media a blow to democracy, accountability”— in the Sunday Times last week timely.
The panel’s argument on the importance of treating information as a public good can never be overstated. However, its intervention falls short in critical respects, particular in failing to identify the precise causal dynamics driving the crisis of public media. This neglect of structural questions of power reproduces a Euro-American framing that obscures the realities of the Global South.
A central weakness of the panel’s article is its lack of conceptual clarity. Of course, this is an opinion piece, but still there is a need to ground the meaning of “public interest media” in the context of this debate. Critical media scholars have long argued that concepts such as “public media” and “public interest” are value-laden, contested and embedded in sociopolitical struggles.
To assume universal agreement on what constitutes “public interest media” is to obscure the historical and political conditions under which certain models of journalism have been elevated, while others, particularly those rooted in the Global South, such as community based knowledge or indigenous traditions, have been marginalised.
So, by leaving the concept undefined, the panel reproduces the hegemony of Euro-American models of public broadcasting or market-supported journalism, assuming their universality while ignoring alternative approaches to communication justice. The effect is to implicitly equate “public interest media” with the liberal commercial media, a model itself shaped by exclusion, commodification and elite interest.
Algorithms systematically privilege global players over local platforms, and thus erode the viability of national media systems
For the subalternised people of the Global South, the capitalist economy has been experienced less as a system of inclusion than as a machinery for marginalisation. The advertising-driven model that sustained much of the 20th century press systemically excluded black, working class and rural voices in South Africa by privileging the few elites. To suggest that “our economy” requires only more investment in public interest media without naming capitalism as the structuring problem risks reproducing precisely the inequalities that have long distorted media systems.
While the panel acknowledges that the advertising revenue model sustaining journalism for decades always carried challenges, including pressures on editorial independence, this admission should not be an aside. It should have been the starting point. Commercialised media have always been structurally bound to power by virtue of their ownership and funding models. The idea that commercial media was ever “free” or “independent” is but a myth.
The digital era has not created this crisis, but it has amplified and accelerated longstanding contradictions. As the South African experience shows, community and alternative press projects that once offered vibrant public interest journalism collapsed decades ago under commercial pressures. What we are witnessing today is not the death of a golden age of “public interest media” but rather the logical culmination of a system that subordinated truth-telling to advertising and market imperatives.
Tech giants have certainly intensified the crisis by siphoning advertising revenue and extracting value from journalism without fair compensation. However, at their core, they operate according to the same logic embraced by commercial media — that is: commodify attention, maximise profit and concentrate power. To lament the excesses of Google, Meta or X while romanticising the commercial media is to miss the structural continuity between them.
The panel’s second line of critique, of government interference, raises another problem. While it is true that authoritarian governments, including Russia, have engaged in repression and disinformation campaigns, it is disingenuous to single them out while ignoring the profound limitations on media freedom within liberal democracies.
For example, the Kimmel case demonstrates that corporate and political censorship operates in the US just as it does elsewhere, albeit often in subtler forms. To imply that Western democracies are bastions of media freedom while authoritarian “others” are the problem, obscures the ways in which concentrated media ownership, political capture and corporate censorship undermine journalism in the so-called free world. This selective framing smacks of media imperialism, a discursive strategy that demonises non-Western states while ignoring the failing of Western democracies.
A more adequate analysis would situate the crisis of journalism within the broader dynamics of media imperialism. For decades, communications scholars have shown how global media flows are dominated by Western corporations, and that marginalises voices from the Global South and reinforces asymmetries of power. The rise of digital platforms has not altered this reality, but has deepened it. Algorithms systematically privilege global players over local platforms, and thus erode the viability of national media systems.
The larger point remains that the Global South countries are structurally dependent on platforms owned and managed in Silicon Valley with little sovereignty over their informational ecosystems. This dependence presents not only a challenge to journalism sustainability but also a profound national security risk.
• Radebe is an associate professor in the University of Johannesburg’s Department of Strategic Communication. He is the author of Apartheid Did Not Die: South Africa’s Unfinished Revolution (Inkani Books)
For opinion and analysis consideration, e-mail Opinions@timeslive.co.za
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