MONDAY, 4.30PM
AS preparations get under way for the ‘media truth commission’, the Freedom of Expression Institute on Monday handed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission a report which says that agreements between the Newspaper Press Union and police and military establishments led to collusion between media management and the apartheid-era government.
FXI leaders told a news conference in Johannesburg that the truth commission should subpoena leaders of apartheid-era media establishments to question them about their role in maintaining apartheid. The NPU’s agreements with the police and the military restricted the work of journalists and editors and amounted to appeasement, FXI executive member Clive Emdon said.
“The NPU was appeasing the government all the way down,” he said. Media managers have argued that they were forced to enter into these agreements or lose their newspapers, but the agreements resulted in the tightening of legislation until journalists and editors were restricted from reporting news unless it came from official sources. Emdon said media managers were well aware that they were colluding with the police.
Emdon said the FXI had received the names of 31 media workers who served as informers for the apartheid government. The names had been passed on to the Truth Commission.
Emdon added the FXI’s report illustrated how the media were pinned down during the apartheid era to allow gross human rights violations to go unreported, and how the former National Party government rendered the media useless and used it to disseminate propaganda.
Employees in senior managerial positions at the SA Broadcasting Corporation also occupied positions on the State Security Council. The FXI said there was extensive government interference in the presentation of news on both television and radio, and the dissemination of propaganda through news programmes became second nature to SABC news departments.
“There is no doubt that by manipulating the news, blandly denying allegations, suppressing here, adding there, disinforming and, one should say, lying and cheating, the SABC on both radio and TV managed to brainwash a substantial section of the white South African public into believing the government’s version of affairs and even supporting its policies.”