This chapter first examines specifically how the legislative apparatus left over from the apartheid period hindered the work of journalists but remained because it suited the democratically elected leaders of the post-apartheid era. Then, it examines how the growing uses of technology, coupled with commercial imperatives, affect the media's role in a democracy. The argument here is that these forms of subjection and interference have had a negative impact on the ‘free’ and ‘independent’ media. Then there is the raft of legislation that has an impact on journalism, and, specifically, the ANC's efforts to promote and explain its insidious creation, the Protection of State Information Bill (Secrecy Bill) through which, as the US media body, the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in the opening quotation, the activities of the independent press would be criminalised while the government of the day would be shielded from scrutiny if this had to be enacted.

The chapter proceeds to an overview of the South African media, to provide details of how it has grown from a small and narrow set of players three decades ago to the more diverse, amorphous and fluid media landscape in the new dispensation – although it also shows the shifts from concentration of media ownership to fragmentation and then back again. The chapter then describes the legal conditions under which journalists have to operate and how, in some instances, the laws have changed to accommodate the free flow of information while, in others, the legislation is deliberately obstreperous: The Promotion of Access to Information Act of 2000, for example, stands in stark contrast to the Protection of State Information Bill, which went before Parliament in July 2010 and again in September 2010, then again in November 2010, and was then passed by the National Assembly in 2011 before amendments were made in May 2012, which included a public interest defence. But then these were withdrawn in June 2012.