The first half of 1976 was momentous for South Africa for two reasons. On the 5th of January, South Africans watched, glued to their cathode ray tube boxes, as the first television news broadcast streamed live from the Auckland Park studios of the SABC, in Afrikaans, of course. Then, in June, an uprising in a nearby township rattled the airwaves as the Soweto Uprising unfolded. Despite the journalists on the ground capturing scenes of desperate fighting and slaughter, audiences watching the broadcasts saw only “sombre and unemotional” figures bringing “law and order” to ship-shape unruly Others. The SABC was under an iron grip of apartheid narrative control, and audiences were unable to see the true horror of apartheid on the newly introduced visual technology. In this way, overseas audiences often saw more about South African protests and unrest than locals living mere kilometres away. Such is the power of popular media and the danger of a government with an iron grip. Through a review of grounded literature, this chapter dual tracks television news and political interference: from the introduction of television news into the country in 1976, through the transformation years of the late 1980s and 1990s, to a completed Ouroboros as we now find it, 50 years since its inception. This chapter applies the framework of the political economy of the media and global journalistic practices to an African broadcaster, the SABC, through a decolonial perspective. In doing so, it argues for the importance of free, pluralistic news with narrative multiplicities, drawing on theory from the political economy of the media and the practice of journalism in the Global South, but gives a warning that this is not the shape of the SABC as it currently stands.