MultiChoice's highly-fraught and controversial South African TV news channel war is once again hotting up with public calls for Naspers' pay-TV arm to be open and transparent and to stop the secrecy around its TV news channels dealings.
Political parties ranging from the EFF to the Democratic Alliance (DA), as well as broadcasting public pressure groups are calling on MultiChoice to release the Newzroom Africa contract, as well as the information around the various bidders who applied, and their eventual ranking.
It comes after MultiChoice last week announced that it has chosen Newzroom Afrika as the new 24-hour local TV news channel to replace Mzwanele Manyi's dumped Afro Worldview channel on DStv.
Newzroom Afrika will launch in early 2019 on DStv and will take the channel number of 405 on MultiChoice's DStv satellite pay-TV platform, the one where ANN7 that turned into Afro Worldview, launched and was dumped a week ago.
Newzroom Afrika, following after eNCA (DStv 403) and SABC News (DStv 404) will be made available to all DStv subscribers, meaning that it will have a wider reach that eMedia Investment's eNCA.
The two directors heading up Newzroom Afrika are Thokozani Nkosi of the production company Eclipse TV, and Thabile Ngwato of Rapid Innovation.
Daily Maverick, run by Branko Brkic as editor-in-chief, on Monday in an opinion piece by Ufrieda Ho, said that the Naspers-owned MultiChoice's dominance in the pay-TV sector "makes its operational decision-making processes matters of public interest".
"It has the de facto monopoly on subscription-based TV, with a 52% share and a penetration of 11.9 million households in 2017. Its influence in deciding who gets to launch a news channel, in the 2019 election year, makes its motives fair game for questions."
Daily Maverick quotes William Bird of Media Monitoring Africa (MMA), who says that MultiChoice's bidding process around the new local TV news channel has lacked transparency and openness from the beginning.
"The way MultiChoice is behaving - only telling the little they want to disclose to seem like they are making the effort to be transparent - undermines not just their own, but all, media credibility. It's why we've called for the shortlist of bidders to be made public and for clarity on ownership and who's funding Newzroom Afrika".
Jackie Rakitla, MultiChoice general manager of corporate affairs, in a quote to Daily Maverick said "We are not sharing the shortlist, evaluation and scoring of bidders as we are respecting the privacy of unsuccessful bidders who are employed within other media companies".
Daily Maverick said that "the all-round silence, no comments and off-the-record-only comment has caused rumours to fly - all of them untested - but unanswered, they are not going away".
