The media are less than honest in their statements to the truth commission regarding their role in apartheid, argues Guy Berger
NEARLY nobody noticed when FWde Klerk told the truth commission last year that government disinformation “could have created a climate” allowing for gross human rights violations to occur.
This surprise admission stands in contrast to the way the press is analysing its role during apartheid. There has been some focus on those worst-case journalists who spied and lied on behalf of the system. The dirt is coming out on how weak or pro-apartheid editors in the “liberal” press spiked and censored stories that should have been published.
There has been criticism that conservatives in the “mainstream” media under PW Botha agreed to “keep their house in order”, leaving it to the alternative weeklies to go it alone in exposing the worst abuses.
But there has been very little assessment of how even the liberal press performed day-to-day legitimation of racial domination – even if some papers criticised the corruption and crimes that flowed so logically from this system. The Sunday Times recently recanted some of its most brazen records, such as when it celebrated a murderous South African Defence Force raid on Botswana with the headline: “The Guns of Gaborone”.
Then Independent Newspapers drew up a dossier setting out historical “shortcomings” in the way its papers – under the Argus company – had accepted press restrictions. In hot response, four retired editors of Independent papers have now defended their personal records as campaigners against apartheid’s gross violations of human rights.
Harvey Tyson, former editor of The Star, declared this week he would never apologise for what he had done as a journalist.
Evidently, he has forgotten the regret expressed in his book Editors Under Fire. In it, he admits to having fallen for security police manipulation in publicising allegations that “KGB colonel” Joe Slovo had blown up his wife, Ruth First. Missing in all this flurry, however, is any scrutiny of how everyday, routine reporting reflected – and contributed to – a climate where black lives were cheap and human rights went unrecognised.
Unlike government supporters like the late former Sunday Times editor, Tertius Myburgh, Harvey Tyson was a liberal editor. Yet like most whites, Tyson probably believed the Slovo story to be plausible at the time. He viewed his role as a watchdog — but failed to see any difference between the legitimate property owners and the real thieves.
The liberal press was, of course, not the same as the SABC which never seriously claimed to be anything other than propaganda for apartheid.
But it was not as different as people like Tyson would like to think. It reflected establishment assumptions where white newsmakers and white audiences counted. Blacks did not. Only a few brave, white English-speaking journalists saw the role of black resistance beyond their papers’ liberal – and limited – opposition.
Attacks by Nationalists added to the illusion harboured by many white liberal journalists that the key actors were themselves and the government. Not black South Africans.
It is an understandable thing for people to assume that they are a leading force for freedom when victimised by a bullying government, and enduring court cases and ever tighter legislative controls.
Liberal journalists may be forgiven for evaluating their role in relation to such pressures. But this logic does fail to locate them in the broader sweep of things.
The liberal press operated in, and took its cues from, the prevailing white landscape. A handful of white editors rose above the conventional wisdom of the day. They “opened an account” and they paid a price: exile for Donald Woods, loss of their jobs in the cases of Raymond Louw, Allister Sparks and Tony Heard. White journalists like these, who tried to lead the white readershp market, rather than follow its prejudices and its interests, also ran into falling circulations. The decline was not compensated for by black readers who failed to attract advertising revenue.
If it wasn’t such context that constrained the role of the liberal press, it was the confined outlook of most white journalists.
Many of these journalists did campaign against “petty” apartheid. But macro- apartheid – especially after bantustan independence — got less critical attention. Coverage sometimes pilloried the pass laws; it routinely neglected the wages paid to migrant workers. The problem with the liberal press is not only that its opposition did not go far enough. Nor even that its champions like Tyson did not realise that there was a lot further to go.
What was worse was the day-to-day reflection of what South Africa was about. Black people were invisible in most newspapers. If you were Desmond Tutu, you got coverage – usually negative – in The Star. If you were a golf caddie featured in a Daily Dispatch picture, you’d be lucky to have even been photographed in the rain standing next to white men enjoying the shelter of an umbrella, with your name captioned as “Jackson”.
The record of black journalistic advancement is similarly pitiful. In 30 years, no white editor matched the record of Drum editor, Anthony Sampson, who empowered an historic generation of top quality black reporters, writers and investigators.
To understand all this context is not to justify the role of the liberal press. It is to explain it. The press today is unlikely to repeat its general complicity with the day-to-day, humdrum mechanics of racial domination. But liberal journalists – of whatever colour – may continue to overlook their role in legitimating other kinds of domination. This is the way that the media represents how men dominate women, adults abuse children, urban people scorn the rural, and the voices of the able drown out those of the disabled.
FW de Klerk has acknowledged that the way that realities are reflected can contribute to a climate where human rights are violated. Journalists need to do likewise.
Guy Berger is professor of journalism and media studies, Rhodes University, and former editor of the alternative weekly, South