In investigating the press, the truth commission must discover who collaborated with the Nationalist government – and who did not, argues Ken Owen
A GOOD place for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to begin its quest for the truth about the media under apartheid, if I may venture a suggestion, is a small matter concerning the prisons that was brought before Judge Oscar Galgut, the formidable chairman of the Press Council, in 1983.
I select this case both because I know the facts and because it captures with singular precision the moral ambiguities and the Kafkaesque atmosphere of the time. It also suggests some useful lines of inquiry.
The Press Council, for the benefit of those whose memories do not stretch to the bizarre details of apartheid’s structures, was a quasi-court established by the publishers of the major newspapers in an attempt to avert legislation to control the press.
Ostensibly, it was intended to ensure that the press adhered to proper standards laid down in a code of conduct; in fact, it was a control mechanism. Judge Galgut took his work seriously.
The prisons case arose because the Sunday Express, of which I was then the editor, had published criticisms of the prisons department made by Mana Slabbert, who was both the wife of the leader of the opposition and, as a sociologist of some standing, an authority on the prisons in her own right.
The prisons department complained to the Press Council that its officials had not been given a chance to comment on Slabbert’s views before publication. I took the view that Slabbert was entitled to say what she pleased without the interference of a lot of ill-educated and self-interested bureaucrats. I rejected their demand out of hand.
Judge Galgut found for the prisons department, thus establishing a pernicious precedent which lingers in our society to this day. The notion that important people, like civil servants and rich businessmen, have a right to examine material prepared for publication and, if they please, to suppress or distort it, has now been incorporated in our law by the notorious Sage Group case.
(In that case, it may be recalled, the Sage Group was given an opportunity to comment before publication, but raced to the courts and obtained from the chief justice a censorship order which, to this day, suppresses information of great public interest. The chief justice observed at the time that editors, unlike judges, were incapable of distinguishing the public interest from their own interest, but as I am no longer an editor, I can say such things.)
I was not surprised by the verdict handed down by Judge Galgut. I never won a case before him, and I did not expect to. So I adopted a policy, as I put it at the time, of forcing him to hang me, and hang me and hang me again until the hangings illuminated the shabby nature of his office. He obliged in the obdurate and unimaginative fashion of those who lack self-doubt.
That we should clash was surely inevitable. I had not long been a newspaper editor, but I had already come to the conclusion that there was no legal path through the net of legislation and regulation which had been spun around the newspapers by the Nationalist government, and that any loophole which might be found would quickly be plugged, so I had fallen back on the best weapon I had, which was the English language.
There was no way, I thought, that the language, with its rich resources of history and law and struggle for freedom in countries around the globe, could be chained by mere laws; if one were clever enough, worked hard enough and called in the help of Sir Thomas More, Thomas Jefferson and Mahatma Gandhi, the language offered the means to say, by innuendo, irony, hyperbole or analogy, whatever one wanted to say.
I wrote, or tried to write, between the lines.
Judge Galgut held an opposite view: “It is the duty of the press,” he wrote pompously, “to ensure, when presenting facts and comment, to avoid biased, tendentious or snide reporting; to avoid juggling with words so as to convey shades of meaning which convey unwarranted suspicions …”
Now, that was exactly what I was trying to do, juggle words, and Judge Galgut saw through me. He meant to have the truth, a literal-minded lawyer’s truth, and he thought such truth was to be found in official comment. It was a subject on which, it seemed to me, he was growing increasingly emotional, even irrational.
In his determination to pin down newspapers to publishing his version of the truth, he began to expand, in the most unjudicial fashion, the meaning of the Press Code of Conduct which he was meant to enforce.
The code, he wrote in one annual report, required that “a rectification should be published as prominently as the challenged article”.
In fact, the code did no such thing: it required rectification to be published “with a degree of prominence which is adequate and fair”. I suppose that, to an authoritarian mind, such distinctions were irrelevant: verboten was verboten (forbidden).
He reprimanded me for publishing a correction (of the number of motorcycle accidents) without an apology, and brushed aside my defence that the code required no apology.
In the end, Joel Mervis, the greatest South African editor of my time, published an article pointing out the dangers and absurdities of the chairman’s interpretation of the code; but even that did not deter the judge.
So the noose tightened around my neck, time and again. I was reprimanded, which he seemed to think should reduce any reasonable editor to jelly; I was ordered to correct reports, and my corrections were found wanting; and I was ordered to publish his findings verbatim, which I did, complete with whereas’s, wherefor’s and the usual judicial illiteracies. It was a war I could win only by losing every battle.
At the same time, however, I pleaded with my management, then represented by Clive Kinsley, to unseat Judge Galgut.
In a letter to Kinsley dated January 7 1983, I wrote: “It is impossible to maintain confidence in a chairman who has failed to absorb the plain meaning of the code, or who has read it so long ago that he has forgotten what it actually says … perhaps you could pursue in the NPU the question of the chairman’s fitness for his position?”
The role of the NPU – the Newspaper Press Union – in these matters deserves scrutiny. The union represented the cartel of publishing companies that produced the major newspapers.
Set up by editors in the last century, the union was later taken over by newspaper managers and became an all-powerful instrument to control the industry. It rigged the markets, crushed new competitors, fixed prices, suppressed salaries and, whenever necessary, struck deals with the apartheid government. It was regarded by most journalists with fear and loathing, and not even the editors dared to risk open defiance of its power.
It was the union that established the network of councils and liaison agreements by which the government sought to control the press. The editors, collectively represented by a weak organisation called the Conference of Editors, were drawn into those agreements by a process of “consultation” that provided protective camouflage for the newspaper managers and the union.
These consultations were conducted, not surprisingly, with the most malleable of the editors – it reminded me of the government’s technique of extracting concessions from weak tribal leaders when stronger leaders resisted mass relocation. But, once signed, those agreements became part of the environment of control in which all newspapers and all editors had to operate.
I was initially surprised, when I attended my first “liaison meeting” with the military brass, to find that officers and newspaper managers tended to close ranks against the editors, but I soon came to understand that it could not be otherwise: both were conservative institutions. Anyway, the managers were flattered to be offered military “briefings” which they could peddle on the cocktail circuit.
So, of course, my appeal to Kinsley was vain, and I fell back on my own resources to deal with the pestilential judge. I managed to juxtapose some of his comments on the press with quotations from Britain and the Soviet Union to show, in the most insulting and provocative way, that Judge Galgut’s views were identical to the Soviet view of the press and directly opposed to the British.
The one view was totalitarian, the other democratic, and the good judge was on the wrong side.
Whether Judge Galgut ever read the piece I cannot say. I had flung down a gauntlet and he did not pick it up. But, whether by coincidence or not, I suddenly found myself free of his torment: every subsequent complaint against the Sunday Express was dismissed on technical-legal grounds. I never again had to appear before the Press Council.
That victory, of course, did not end the wider struggle, but it demonstrates quite amusingly how the battle had to be fought.
By the time I became an editor in 1982, the major newspapers were already hopelessly compromised, and entangled in agreements with the government; such as the Defence Agreement of September 1980 in which the NPU had agreed to be dishonest. (Clause 7.1.3 forbade them to say that the minister of defence had declined to comment even when he declined to comment.)
The system of control and manipulation had grown over a long period, but the rot had begun, in my view, in the early Sixites when the best “alternative” newspapers of my time – Contact (liberal) and New Age (communist) – were driven out of existence.
The union devoted its efforts not to the defence of the principles of a free press, but to the defence of its cartel, negotiating with John Vorster’s government to exclude their newspapers from government restrictions in return for good behaviour. The result was the first Press Code of Conduct.
The climate of those times is difficult to recapture, but we should try. Laurence Gandar, legendary editor of the Rand Daily Mail, was pilloried (and finally dismissed) for progressive policies that included using the term “African” instead of “native”.
His newspaper openly supported the Progressive Party, but I have a memorandum in which he argued that it was simply not feasible to support the “radical” proposal of the Liberal Party for a universal franchise. The Rand Daily Mail was not a radical publication. “Public opinion”, meaning white opinion, would not stand for that.
When Brian Bunting, the communist editor of New Age, was banned from his work, the late Miles Brokensha and I (both of us then officials of the Cape Town branch of the South African Society of Journalists) tried in vain to garner support for him: we ended up sending a protest telegram to Vorster in our own names, a futile gesture. The press, owners, publishers, managers, journalists looked the other way. Public opinion, you understand, was a reality.
Compromise, and compromising behaviour, became the price of surivival. Years later I heard a Hungarian say that in the West to throw a stone was a political act; behind the Iron Curtain, it was a lamentable breakdown of self-discipline. I thought I understood what he meant. Those were the years when even the communist leaders fled in droves.
For many years after the closure of Contact and New Age, no alternative newspaper – not even The World – could survive, and it fell to the mainstream newspapers to manoeuvre and negotiate and strike deals, until at last sufficient political space had been opened for a new crop of alternative papers to emerge. It was in the dark years, say from the closure of New Age to the launching of The Weekly Mail, that the deadliest compromises were forged.
By the time I became an editor in 1982, the network of controls was more or less in place, though I had to decide at my first meeting of the Conference of Editors (which represented the editors, as distinct from publishers, owners and managers) whether to try to veto an extension of the system.
Technically, I had the power to do so (since a single vote in the conference killed any proposal), but that would have collapsed the conference and negated the many years of negotiation that had preceded the meeting. It was not a realistic prospect.
I voiced my doubts, but allowed myself to be guided by the senior editors, liberal and conservative, English and Afrikaans, white and (in the rotund shape of Percy Qoboza) black: I did not vote one way or the other. That was my contribution to the establishment of the system.
Soon afterwards, however, I was to conclude that the NPUagreements were a major obstacle to a free press, not least because they served to conceal the nature of the regime, and I set about circumventing, undermining and evading the system by methods which offended Judge Galgut.
Other editors did the same, though some did not (and that distinction should be clarified), but the union was no help at all. My protests against the system were brushed aside by my own management and by the union.
On one occasion when I complained of the police agreement, I received from Jolyon Nuttall, brother of the famous anti- apartheid cleric, a blistering letter on behalf of the union pointing out that I was myself an alternate on one of the committees of the Conference of Editors which had acquiesced in the deal. I was hoist on my own moral ambivalence, and my managers, at critical points, could abandon me with impunity. They did.
The battles that were fought behind the scenes were bureaucratic, pettifogging, tedious and usually vain. They demanded a kind of dogged courage until, after 1990, it suddenly proved possible to demolish the control structures entirely. For that demolition I can, I think, claim some credit. But I do not know the full history; my records are not complete.
The answers lie, if they have not been shredded, in the documents and files of the union and the head offices of Argus- Independent and the South African Association of Newspapers-Times Media Limited.
Those archives may tell us something as to why editors like Gandar, Raymond Louw, Allister Sparks and Tony Heard were fired. Unlike most of my colleagues, I do not believe they were fired for their politics, but because their politics (and sometimes their management of their departments) came to be seen as a threat to profitability. The distinction is important.
The owners and managers of the industry did not care about what was indisputably one of the great moral conflicts of the century; they did not, in the main, even understand why it was a moral issue. They cared about profit.
That, in my view, is why they set up and maintained the cartel; that is why (until Stephen Mulholland took over) they paid their journalists so atrociously and trained them so poorly; that is why the newspapers were perpetually understaffed and subject to destructive levels of staff turnover. That is why editors were fired irrespective of their value as anti-apartheid fighters. That is why the union made its compromising deals with the devil.
The proof, one way or the other, lies in the records which, so far, the truth commission has not bothered to seize or examine. Proof lies also in the recollections of judges like Galgut and Marius Diemont, managers like Nuttall and Roy Paulson, long-serving directors like Charl Cilliers, the various officials and office-holders of the union and the press and media councils.
I point to the existence of this evidence because what is happening now is a travesty of truth and justice. The generalised and unsubstantiated accusations of collaboration which have been brought against so-called “liberal” journalists (hardly any of whom, we may recall, called themselves liberals at the time) are simply defamatory.
They are defamatory of, among others, early opponents of apartheid like Tony Delius, Stan Uys and Molly Reinhardt; investigators of the Broederbond like Charlie Bloomberg (who eked out his paranoiac life in terror of the security police) and Hennie Serfontein, and later Hans Strydom and Ivor Wilkens; Benjamin Pogrund who pioneered the mainstream coverage of politics in black communities; Steven Friedman and Riaan de Villiers who pioneered the reporting of labour politics; Martin Welz, Mervyn Rees and Kitt Katzin who took on, and brought low, a succession of the most powerful men of the times; and many others who wrote the first draft of the history of apartheid.
The list could go on, and on, and on. I did not agree with all of them, and was sharply critical of some, but they do not deserve to be defamed and I am appalled that they have been so feebly defended by the corporate managers and by Rex Gibson, the last editor of the Rand Daily Mail, who should know better.
The statements so far offered to the truth commission are filled with platitude and pious protestation, but they conceal more than they tell. They try to stretch a blanket of journalistic respectability to cover the owners and managers, and the blanket is torn. Generalised accusation, generalised defence – the result is not the truth.
Collaboration with apartheid did occur; that is a matter of record. The point is to discover who did, and who did not, collaborate, and how and why. To say, without ado, that the “liberal media” collaborated is to lie.
A proper inquiry will find the press to have been a house divided, and that, among the many obstacles in the path of the journalists, some of the greatest were placed by the owners and managers of the newspapers.
The full truth may be unattainable; evidence is not. The question is whether the truth commission will make the huge effort, intellectual and organisational, that will be required to get that evidence. The question is whether the truth commission will examine the documents, question the witnesses, understand the struggle.
If not, we must abandon the pretence of searching for the truth. Pretence of truth, doubly deceptive, is worse than untruth.
I was among those who supported the establishment of the truth commission, but as I watch the process that has ensued I regret that I did not insist instead on a Nuremberg process.
At Nuremberg, at least, individual people had to answer for individual crimes and they were tried by a process, tested over many centuries, that is designed to find the truth. The charges at Nuremberg were specific, the evidence rigorous, the search for truth disciplined by examination, cross- examination, and re-examination.
Nuremberg, whatever else one may say about it, was neither a lynching, nor a forum for smears, half-truth and petty vengefulness. Even Judge Galgut would, I think, understand the distinction.