The article sets out to examine the television news coverage of the 2016 local government elections in South Africa by examining the extent to which the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) fulfilled the mandate of public service broadcasting (PSB). The primary objective of the article is to assess how the broadcaster's newscasts mediated pluralistic politics during the local government election campaign, in line with normative public sphere principles. Drawing on conceptual understandings of PSB, with a focus on public sphere theory, we analysed prime news bulletins to determine whether the SABC fulfilled its PSB mandate. Our findings, informed by a mixed method approach of qualitative and quantitative enquiry, revealed an over-reliance, by the SABC, on political party activities for news coverage instead of actively seeking out information and issues; thereby giving parties, with greater resources, inequitable amounts