SECTOR 4 to upgrade their skills and often there is lots of resistance to this – for people to move from analogue to digital. A lot of this sort of training is needed at the SABC.’ Scores: Individual scores: 1 Country does not meet indicator 2 Country meets only a few aspects of indicator 3 Country meets some aspects of indicator 4 Country meets most aspects of indicator 5 Country meets all aspects of the indicator Average score: ✓✓ ✓✓ ✓✓✓✓ ✓ ✓✓✓ 4.1 (2013: 3.8; 2010: 2.8; 2008: 3.8; 2006: 4.0) 4.8 Equal opportunities regardless of race or ethnicity, social group, gender/sex, religion, disabilities and age are promoted in media houses It was noted that in recent years, a large number of senior, white journalists were being fired or retrenched from mainstream media houses and that the current environment was very unfavourable to this segment. However, racial divisions were still relevant and mention was made that the ‘boetie-boetie [friendship] network’ still manifests in so many ways. ‘The single biggest problem to promoting diversity in newsrooms is social groups. You’ll find certain roles are most often filled by people from particular social groups. For example, all my dash subs are white people, simply because my chief sub knows them and he trusts them. It’s still about who you know.’ e.tv and the SABC reportedly had policies in place encouraging the employment of a certain percentage of people with disabilities. e.tv’s policy was said to be that 1% of staff must be disabled. However, a panellist noted that of the 3,000 staff at the SABC, it was ‘unlikely there were even five people there with disabilities’. Panellists felt that there was a decline in the number of women working at editor level and that newsrooms were not always comfortable in giving senior jobs to black women: they rather placed them as deputy editors, rather than editors. A 2018 Sanef/Genderlinks report on the glass ceiling for women in South African newsrooms indicated that there was an invisible yet real barrier to the advancement of senior women through pervasive sexism in media houses. The report noted that challenges for women in the South African media are becoming less about numbers and more about the underlying sexism in the media, with new threats such as cyber-based misogyny emerging. 59 AFRICAN MEDIA BAROMETER SOUTH AFRICA 2018