The people who should answer for the medias apartheid past were absent from the commission hearings, writes Ferial Haffajee
Ironically, those who represented the media at this weeks Truth and Reconciliation Commission probe into their past were its brightest symbols of the future.
Times Media Limiteds (TML) Cyril Ramaphosa, the Independent Groups Moegsien Williams and the SABCs Govin Reddy came to represent their organisations at the commissions account of the omissions and misdeeds of yesterdays press and broadcasting barons.
The three were a contradiction. At one level they revealed a media corps on the cusp of a much brighter future. At another, their presence highlighted glaring absences Deon du Plessis, Harvey Tyson and Andrew Drysdale from the old Argus group; Stephen Mulholland and Nigel Bruce from South African Associated Newspapers (SAAN)/TML.
The commissioners, who had assembled to determine whether the media could be held responsible for gross human rights violations, looked perplexed. They didnt find themselves sitting across from yesterdays dragons responsible for the massive distortions in news coverage, the closing of brave newspapers and the systematic repression of black journalists which submission after submission had testified to.
Instead, the commissioners heard todays leaders lay down impressive plans and make dignified promises.
Such practices as happened here must never happen again, said Ramaphosa, promising a great shake-up at TML.
The Independent Groups team acknowledged that the Argus Company had been a staid, cautious, slow-moving company, while its chief executive officer Ivan Fallon added: Our company has changed dramatically. We reject that an apartheid mindset still exists.
Instead, both groups promised more powerful positions for black journalists, more newspapers and the possibility of funding a media diversity fund to break down the monopoly they continue to hold over the press in South Africa.
But commissioner Mary Burton was not letting them off the hook that easily. There was an indictment of the media which the commission came across every day, she said. Everywhere people tell the commission: We had no idea what was happening, adding that in some small towns, local newspapers would not write about the commission because advertisers didnt like that kind of copy.
But here, even the new boys would not concede easily. TMLs chief operating officer Lawrence Clarke claimed a proud record opposing apartheid and encouraging dialogue. Both groups said they had not interfered in the work of their editors but that they had always been mindful of their fiduciary duties to their shareholders which meant they did not risk pushing the borders of press freedom that the alternative newspapers later showed off to great effect.
There were nods of remembrance when Jon Qwelane reeled off a litany of bad practice by the two newspaper houses: separate canteens, separate crockery, different pay and different news values. One incident stayed with him.
On a Friday on the beat, he remembered, a black man had committed suicide, leaving seven children destitute. On the same day, a truck with sheep had overturned on the highway. The sheep made it onto the first page of the Sunday Star. The seven children just squeezed onto the news pages of the Africa edition.
The wolves in sheeps clothing also shed their disguises at this weeks hearings. A slew of media spies from the old security forces appeared before the commission dishing out confidential documents marked Uiters Geheim by the dozen.
National Police Commissioner George Fivazs communications adviser Craig Kotze chose the hearings to come clean and reveal one of South Africas worst-kept secrets: that he had been a security branch agent while he worked at The Star .
From his testimony, he seemed neither an able spy nor journalist: I was expected to operate like any other journalist and I was in fact often scooped by opposition media on some big stories [like] the Winnie Mandela, Stompie Seipei and Olivia Forsyth stories among them.