ABSTRACT
In this concluding chapter, I have highlighted the book’s arguments that Eurocentric media theories have largely failed to connect with global south media contexts. The logic that the Western media is the example of ‘free media’ that every other media system should emulate diametrically presents global south media as Western media’s antithesis. The importance of meaning and context in explaining the role of the media (and of PSB in particular) cannot be understated; consequently, I have emphasised that a focus restricted to the micro-context of the SABC itself could be limiting, as it falls short of connecting the local to larger structures, power relations, and global processes. It is, therefore, essential to draw attention to local forms of agency, and it is equally important to focus on how these are linked to larger structures. Thus, I deployed the decolonial approach, which focuses on how the making and taking of meaning is shaped at every level by the structured asymmetries in social relations. In this way connected to the SABC are a wider web of social relations and practices of wider global power matrices. It is these power relations that shape the definitions of objectivity or neutrality in relation to PSB ‘independence’.
