Africa News Network7 (ANN7) has launched ‘SA Decides — My Vote. My Future’, a plan for “the country’s most comprehensive coverage ever focusing on the 7 May general election”. The channel said it had deployed an “unprecedented nine reporter-led crews with live broadcast vans, one for each province, to bring exhaustive nationwide reportage of the country’s fifth general election since democracy was established 20 years ago following the end of apartheid”.
“Our unprecedented path-breaking coverage is unrivaled in its depth and breadth,” ANN7 editor in-chief Moegsien Williams said, announcing details of the network’s plan. “As historic as the elections, our coverage is a paradigm shift in South Africa.”
The SA Decides teams are also carrying out an opinion poll by asking voters to fill up detailed questionnaires. The results fetched from this poll, which would eventually have covered more than 50 000 voters, would be aired daily through the two months of its coverage, the ANN7 said.
Over the next two months, the nine five-member crews of SA Decides will “reach every nook and cranny of South Africa and be a platform to its 51 million citizens to voice their experiences of the last 20 years and expectations from the nation in the future”, it said in a statement. “This is a barometer to the nation’s mood like none other,” Williams said.
Leader of the election teams, Margriet Coetzee, said the coverage would allow citizens “at ground zero” to air their views and that the journalists would “enable community debates by bringing together community leaders with local political and municipal leaders over public issues such as service delivery”.
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