STEPHEN Mulholland (Letters, July 25 to 31) quotes an internal report critical of my editorship of The Cape Times.
As a general comment, I find much of the editorial/managerial breast-beating about most newspapers undoubtedly blemished pasts tedious. I include my editorship as blemisheed because I know that though we got in the odd blow most of the time we were not earning the Red Badge of Courage but ducking and weaving under government onslaught.
But since the point was raised, I should say this: the internal report was done in September 1986 almost a year before my firing in August 1987. If it was so irredeemably damning, Mulholland, as managing director, was in dereliction of duty not firing me then. On the contrary, there was subsequent Mulholland congratulation, including these (attached notes) straight from the MDs office, less than three months before the firing, and eight months after the internal report:
May 12 1987: Many thanks for your informative note on the affairs of The Cape Times. Your targets are ambitious but given the energy and determination, achievable.
May 25 1987: Your contribution to the recovery of the company over the past year is deeply appreciated. The attached bonus cheque comes to you with the best wishes of the board and is recognition of the efforts you have made. Anthony Heard, Cape Town
Argus man on high ground
IT seems the M&G has inadvertently made Jolyon Nuttall the fall guy for the Argus company. In Media bosses who played the apartheid game (July 18 to 24) a quotation of Ken Owens is taken out of context and used as a caption to a photograph. Out of context it has a different meaning to what Owen says in the article that Nuttall was pointing out that he, Owen, was also compromised. Werent we all? This sub-editing has casually damaged the reputation of a fine man.
If the Argus company can claim any high ground at all it is because Nuttall earned it for the company. He launched The Stars Teach Fund in 1971, and raised more than R3-million (a considerable amount in the 1970s) for the building of schools in the Johannesburg region after government funding was withdrawn. In the first 10 years of the fund, 430 classrooms were built. By 1990 Teach had provided a primary education for at least half a million children who would not otherwise have had access to classrooms.
The Alexandra Community Education Centre voted him its chairman in the 1980s. In this capacity he raised the bulk of R20-million needed to provide technical education for Alexandra pupils and a community hall for the people.
When Nuttall was president of the Newspaper Press Union, from late 1988 to 1990, all the NPU agreements with defence and the police had been in place for some time and by then most newspapers, including the Argus group, were beginning to ignore the agreements.
Perhaps Nuttall was a fall guy because he probably is the only Argus manager with a criminal record. He was found guilty in 1962 of entering a Native Reserve without a permit. He was visiting Chief Albert Luthuli in Groutville. Marilyn Honikman, Cape Town
* REX Gibson was one of the great muck-raking editors of the apartheid era, happy to expose any dark corner to the fierce light of public scrutiny and robust debate, so it is sad to see him now (July 25 to 31) trying to limit disclosures before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission lest who-knows-who starts complaining about separate coffee cups, or some sneering columnist (me?) barges into his act.
No doubt some people will be offended by his attempt to trivialise racial discrimination in the workplace as a matter of coffee cups (he should talk to his old friend Ameen Akhalwaya on that subject!) but, as one writer to another, I can see what he is trying to do, even respect the virtuosity. If there is anything worth saying, he has said it, and will lesser folk please keep their petty grievances to themselves?
He trivialises, too, the intimidation and harassment of the Press Council, calling it a mere nuisance. In fact, it was the resistance of the editors that rendered each successive reincarnation of the council ineffectual, forcing the newspaper managers to strike new deals with an impatient government. Talk of missing the point!
One can see Gibsons problem. He has been given a job to do, and in the time-honoured fashion of freelance hacks, he has recycled an old article which mirabile dictu gives simultaneous expression to his own personal and subjective feelings and to what the Times Media Limited board believes. (Including Cyril Ramaphosa? Really?)
He has done no serious research. He has no idea what I, and presumably other editors, did, tried to do, failed to do, or achieved. He treats facts and hard evidence as Eva Peron treated accountants: who cares, so long as ones heart is in the right place, and one was, in ones younger days, passionate. Tut.
Since he does not like details dates, names, correspondence, minutes I am myself driven back on assertion.
Firstly, it is an outrage that the TRC should investigate the media context of the violation of human rights if it does not also investigate the judicial context in which judges enforced apartheid law, and lawyers and advocates made the system work. On this point I agree with Alex Boraine (though I would like to see him also called to account for the years he drew a state salary as an MP, possessed of much greater freedom of speech than any journalist, but making no memorable impression until the day he quit).
Secondly, if the TRC insists on investigating such matters, it must do the job properly. The commissioners are not there simply to ride around in the sort of cars that Mary Burton would be ashamed to accept. For the victims of the TRC, who are likely to see their lifes work trashed on the basis of such shallow PR submissions as Gibsons, this is no trivial matter.
The TRC has no right to be sloppy, superficial, or lazy, and especially it has no right to ignore the mountains of evidence which are available in various corporate archives.
Finally, Gibsons rhetorical defence of the journalists is nothing but declamation. It is not only feeble, but in its cosy tone, its coy admission of undefined human fallibility, in its avoidance of nasty specifics, and in its pretence of good intentions, it is remarkably like FW de Klerks submission on behalf of the National Party. He did a better job for Greg Blank.
I cant help feeling that Gibson the crusading editor would have given short shrift to Gibson the PR-man. Ken Owen, Cape Town