South Africa frequent victims, and obfuscation by government officials and business people when requests for information were made. Concerns continued to be raised about the low compliance with South Africa’s Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA), with denial of 46% and 67% of requests by the public and private sector respectively. WAN-IFRA expressed mounting concern over what it described as the suffocation of independent and critical media through the Government Communication and Information System’s withdrawal of advertising spending, and the opaque allocation processes for state financial resources to media. The print media had a tough year with attacks by police on journalists covering protests, obstruction by the police of journalists and photographers at crime and accident scenes. The media, especially the daily and weekly newspapers, have performed a sterling service for the country in publicising stories about state capture, corruption, abuse of power and questionable conduct of politicians and officials. Print investigative reporters have excelled in unearthing much of this information and gaining access to and publicising the contents of correspondence in leaked emails - the so-called secret Gupta emails – which revealed details of the corrupt activity. In the course of the year, criticism of Zuma’s indiscretions and poor governance mounted and the calls on him to resign or be dismissed became more strident. The trend in declining print media circulations over the last few years continued in 2017 and was reflected in the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures for Quarter 4 (Q4). Losses were incurred “across the board” in the newspaper category, with a 2.1% drop from Q3 2017 and 5.1% from the previous year. The dailies showed a 17% drop on 2016, although there were some small individual gains. Magazines presented a gloomy picture with an 8.1% decline over Q3, and a further nasty 16.6% decline over the previous year. The ABC reported that “significant declines” occurred in the custom sector, but that the consumer magazines suffered too with only some showing marginal increases. The losses were attributed largely to the onslaught of the internet, social media in particular, and led to a further decline in advertising revenue with knock-on effects on the financial viability of publications and consequent cuts in expenditure on news-gathering and staffing. The most dramatic result of the decline in advertising revenue together with the effects of the country’s weak economy, was the closure by the Tiso Blackstar publishing house of the print edition of The Times, the sister daily publication of the Sunday Times which was launched in 2007. It closed in December and was So This is Democracy? 2017 89