The Human Rights Commission has completed its quest to find racism in the media Howard Barrell, Evidence wa ka Ngobeni and Jaspreet Kindra Two years after starting an inquiry into alleged racism in, first, the Mail & Guardian and the Sunday Times and, then, the entire media, the Human Rights Commission (HRC) has produced a final report which has earned it both ringing condemnations and faint praise. Editors this week were strongest in rejecting the HRC’s recommendation that regulatory bodies monitoring the print media should be backed up by legislation. They said this was unnecessary and a threat to press freedom. The South African National Editors Forum (Sanef) described the suggestion as “dangerous”, adding that the print media had always had a voluntary arrangement for enforcing its own code of conduct. The commission also found that the media in South Africa was racist. Media organisations were also deeply concerned that the HRC chair, Barney Pityana, had not kept his undertaking to the media to consult them on the contents of his final report before it was released. Pityana gave a clear undertaking to this effect during the HRC’s hearings into racism in the media in March.
He said: “When we have a very early draft of the report, we will take the occasion to discuss it before it is finalised, with some key role players, certainly with Sanef, and … we can participate in shaping or reshaping whatever the final product [is], and my hope will be that by doing so this will continue to be participatory right up to the end.” On the same issue, on the last day of the inquiry, Pityana said: “The plan remains that we are hoping that, by the end of July, we will have a draft of the comprehensive report and possibly for publication in end of August.”
HRC commissioner Jody Kollapen said the HRC had never wanted to give the impression that it was willing to “negotiate the contents of the report”. He said the commission had not released the report to interested parties as no institution had been found guilty. The M&G’s editor and legal advisers were also under the impression that they would be provided with a draft on which they could comment seven days before its publication. Notwithstanding this, in a statement Sanef said the HRC report was “a sober assessment”. Dene Smuts, media representative for the Democratic Alliance, the new opposition grouping, said the HRC’s finding that the media was racist was “meaningless”. She added that the HRC’s recommendation that the print media be regulated like broadcasting “misses the point that the justification for regulating broadcasting is the scarcity of electromagnetic spectrum”. Smuts said: “We are not fooled by the suggestion that [the proposed press regulator] should be ‘under the control of the media’ when it is proposed that it should be set up ‘by legislation’.” She expected the forthcoming Conference on Racism to “prepare the ground for the next assault on free speech”.
Jim Jones, editor of Business Day, said: “The report, and the process the commission set in motion, will have a positive impact on South African journalism in a number of respects. Among these are that it serves to ensure all journalists remain sensitive to the racial factors at work in South Africa, and the need to take account of these in their day-to-day activities. It also highlights the efforts the media, like other South African business institutions, still need to make to diversify their staff complements.” He, too, was “strongly opposed to the proposal that the print media should fall under any statutory mechanism for monitoring purposes”.
A leading media analyst, Raymond Louw, formerly editor of the strongly anti- apartheid Rand Daily Mail, pointed out that the world’s “best democracies” such as the United States and the United Kingdom felt no need to introduce legislation to monitor print media. Louw described the finding recommending statutory press regulation as a “blanket condemnation” of the media. Louw added that the findings were unfair to publications such as community newspapers, which had not come under the commission’s scrutiny.
Tim du Plessis, editor of The Citizen, said the HRC was wrong in suggesting that there should be extra legislation, which, he said, was an infringement of press freedom. But Du Plessis said he was “in agreement with the tone of the report”. John Conynghyam, editor of the Natal Witness, said there was no need for other mechanism as the existing legislative framework was sufficient to deal with the media and dismissed the suggestion of a statutory regulatory body for the press as an attempt to “police the media”. Azhar Cachalia, a partner at attorneys Cheadle Thompson and Haysom, who represents the M&G, said South Africa already had sufficient legislation to “deal with the media”.
The HRC’s final report provides a narrative of the inquiry from 1998, when the commission was approached by the Black Lawyers Association and Association of Black Accountants of South Africa to investigate alleged “subliminal racism” on the part of the M&G and the Sunday Times. It details the HRC’s decision to broaden the inquiry to cover alleged racism in the entire media. One of the more controversial sections of the report provides an account of the HRC’s dispute with the media over the character of the proposed inquiry and the threat to subpoena editors to appear before it. The HRC alleges, among other things, that the media “chose to ignore” its true intentions, gave the public “biased and ill-informed” commentary on it, and fed the public on a “regular diatribe of a brave and fearless media under attack”. The HRC says in the report that it found the South African media defensive about racism, and that fears that it was a “Trojan Horse” for the government to take action against racism in the media were unfounded. In its report, the commission also mounts a defence of Claudia Braude and the Media Monitoring Project, who did research for it that was included in its interim report. This research was widely ridiculed. The HRC does, however, suggest in its final report that Braude’s and the monitoring project’s approach to their research – which focused largely on the incidence of racial stereotypes – was rather limited. Jones of Business Day said he disputed the HRC’s “interpretation of events leading up to the hearing earlier this year. Also, its assessment of some of the research it commissioned could have been more critical.”
The aspect of the report most likely to raise eyebrows, however, is its failure to evaluate complaints made against the media, or editors’ and other media workers’ submissions. In arriving at its conclusions, the report relies, instead, on a theoretical exploration of racism to argue that, if a particular media product is received by a reader/ listener or viewer as racist, then it is racist – regardless of the state of mind of whoever was responsible for that product. This forms the basis of the report’s main conclusion: that the South African media is racist.
Professor Keyan Tomaselli, a media analyst from the University of Natal in Durban, said the final report was considerably better than the HRC’s interim report. He said, however, that, following the HRC investigation into the media and the research done for its interim report, “South African media studies is in dissaray. We will now have to repair the damage and reconstruct our discipline.” Meanwhile, at a press conference to unveil the report, Pityana said his commission has received a request from Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Penuell Maduna for an inquiry into racism into the “court system.”
The full HRC report is available on the M&G’s website at www.mg.co.za