‘Setting the agenda’: the production of opinion at theSunday Times

Abstract

The news media in a democracy are widely expected to facilitate public debate on matters of significance to its citizens. However, commentators and issues for newspaper opinion pages are necessarily selected from a broad set of possibilities, and the process of selection is thus significant in shaping the nature of debate and opinion in the media. This article examines how ideas and topics enter the South African print media for public discussion, specifically how opinion pieces and columns are chosen for inclusion in the Sunday Times. Using interviews with decision makers at the Sunday Times, as well as observation of newsroom processes and some analysis of the opinion pages, the research established a number of key factors at play in the ‘gatekeeping’ of opinion, analysis and debate. These include journalistic professional norms, which prioritise news and politics as criteria for selecting topics for discussion; an adherence to notions of public deliberation that resonate with the Habermasian concept of the public sphere; and an awareness of the Sunday Times as an agenda setter with a role to play in a transforming democracy. These factors, I argue, amount to an active ‘orchestration’ of debate.

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