Former associate editor Gerald Shaw argues a charter is useless unless there is all-round support
Times Media Limited’s proposed editorial charter for preserving the independence of their newspapers is poorly timed, as the Mail & Guardian has argued (July 12 to 18), but there are more compelling reasons to have scant confidence in the TML plan.
The roster of editors, who have been fired or prematurely retired, is long and honourable. And there is certainly a case for guarantees that editors who have spent the best years of their lives in the service of their proprietors and the public interest should be treated with the consideration they deserve.
Yet proprietors do have the right, and the power, to dismiss editors, even if it is plain that this power has not always been exercised wisely. Regrettably, attempts to limit proprietorial power by means of charters are unlikely to survive a determined resolve on the part of proprietors to rid themselves of an unwanted editor.
In the liberal tradition of newspaper management, the editor’s power is immense — as long as he or she remains in the editorial chair.
This power is necessarily balanced by the proprietors’ control of the editor’s tenure. The proprietors appoint the editor, having satisfied themselves that the journalist of their choice will uphold the traditions, values and practices of the publication and having bound the editor contractually to do so. But it is the editor who from day to day applies these traditions and values in the news and opinion columns of the newspaper.
This is the way things have worked most of the time in the South African English-language press; as long as they were in the chair, editors have been free to do their job in the public interest. But they have always had to live with the risk of a clash with proprietors and sudden retirement, resignation or dismissal.
The case which caused the Argus Company to attract more odium than anything else in its history was the sacking of Dominic McCausland, editor of the Cape Argus, when he was instructed by the board — on the insistence of John Martin — to cease writing editorials critical of Britain’s appeasement policy on the eve of World War II. McCausland held that his judgment of the situation was sound and kept on warning that Adolf Hitler was a threat to the peace of the world and would have to be stopped. History has vindicated him.
Twenty years later, the Argus directors were unhappy with the line of the mildly eccentric Argus editor, Morris Broughton, towards the proposed change to a republican system of government. Broughton urged readers to make up their own minds on the merits: a yes vote by English South African in the referendum would win much goodwill in the Afrikaans-speaking community, he believed, and might result in a softening of the National Party’s racial policies.
In any event, Broughton was summoned to Johannesburg and was carpeted by the managing director.
Broughton was not sacked, but was appointed European editor of the Argus Company, and based himself on a resort island in the Mediterranean where he lived until retirement.
In the mid-1960s, the sacking of Rand Daily Mail editor Laurence Gandar by proprietors was widely perceived as motivated by political considerations. Gandar had swung the United Party-supporting RDM behind the Progressive Party and had incurred massive legal costs in a brave and effective campaign to expose inhumane prison conditions in South Africa.
Then-chairman of South African Associated Newspapers (SAAN) Clive Corder, was summoned by then-justice minister John Vorster and told that something had to be done about the Mail. Although he does not mention this interview in his privately-circulated memoirs, Corder did say that the SAAN board had to “curb” Gandar — because he was damaging South Africa.
Gandar’s prophetic columns in the 1960s warned South Africans of the violence and upheaval in store unless racial discrimination was scrapped. Today it is fashionable to say that he was “ahead of his time”.
As another of the honourable company of sacked editors, Anthony Heard of the Cape Times has noted: “It is fine to be right. But it seems you must not be right too soon.”
No one disputes the right of proprietors to demand the resignation of an editor whose policies are so unacceptable to readership and advertisers as to endanger the survival of the title. In the case of Gandar (and his successors Raymond Louw and Allister Sparks), this was manifestly not the case. SAAN (and the Mail) were in deep financial waters, certainly, but we have it on the authority of SAAN director Gordon Waddell that the problem was not editorial policy, but failure on the part of management.
The sudden dismissal of Anthony Heard, after a long award-winning editorship of the Cape Times, was explained by the proprietors as necessary on managerial and operating grounds.
Heard edited the Cape Times with singular courage in the state of emergency of the 1980s. His paper’s outspoken comment and reportage in conditions of harassment and media restriction infuriated then- state president PW Botha and the security establishment. Botha complained angrily to the proprietors. Again there was public disquiet when Heard was dismissed. Had yet another editor paid the penalty for trying to keep faith with readers?
If proprietors exercise their prerogative unwisely or in a manifestly craven or ignoble manner, they damage the credibility and influence of the newspapers they control and incur the wrath of informed public opinion.
Apart from these inhibitions on proprietors, editors can be given some security of tenure in contracts which make it painfully expensive for the owners to dismiss them — or which can land proprietors in court proceedings.
Yet both supporters and opponents of the TML charter are missing the point. If proprietors and editors have no confidence in each other, charters in fine language avail nothing.
The successful publication of a newspaper requires a unity of purpose and a relationship of confidence between proprietors, management, editor and staff. It matters little whether or not this is expressed in a written charter, as long as this unity and confidence are there. If they are not, a charter is useless.
Gerald Shaw, recently retired associate editor of the Cape Times, is currently teaching at the School of Journalism at Rhodes University