/ 8 June 2001

How to get to the Louis

Robert Kirby

CHANNELVISION

Here you are one evening, an ordinary husband, chatting with your neighbour’s husband on the pavement outside your house.

Suddenly, around the corner comes an SABC television cameraman. He don’t say nuttin’, he don’t plant ‘taters he just keep his camera rolling along. Then he piss off hastily out of sight. A week later you see an SABC television “investigative” documentary about the “Disturbing Increase Of Suburban Sex Workers”. The screen is filled with shots of squalid hookers, swarming around pavements, brandishing their randies.

To your horror you see footage of you and your neighbour, artfully cut in to the documentary so that you look like a couple of the hookers’ lonely customers. The next day your workmates are not very subtle in their jibes. Worse, your boss says the image of the company has taken a nose-dive as a result of your being seen out leasing pundah and that some major sales have been cancelled. You’re put on suspension.

When you get home that evening there’s a letter from a gay lawyer announcing the commencement of divorce proceedings.

Such is the power of television. You write to the SABC to complain and some sanctimonious SABC-style bureaucratic mother writes back and tells you to go and piss up a rope.

Now, here’s an actual story. Some weeks ago the SABC’s Special Assignment team went on another of their worthy forays, producing a couple of poor imitations of subjects long since scoured out far more efficiently by Carte Blanche. Special Assignment visited a nightclub in Pretoria, infamous for being a haven for drug dealers and any measure of concomitant social malfeasances.

An SABC cameraman also went to a neighbouring establishment to get some footage of a singer. In doing so he filmed, among others in the singer’s audience, a fellow having a beer at the bar. When the programme was edited and broadcast this bit was included, but with no explanation from the narrator to say that the bit was filmed in innocent premises. Viewers were left to assume the fellow having a beer was one of the drug haven’s customers.

The fellow concerned suffered emotional and material consequences. He complained to and received an ill-mannered brush-off from the SABC.

So he laid a complaint with the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa (BCCSA). The judgement from that august body went against the SABC and a far from abject apology to the gentleman was duly broadcast.

End of story but not end of comment. What is examined here is the fuck-you attitude adopted by the SABC in its response to the man’s complaint, argued at the BCCSA hearing on the SABC’s behalf by one Louis Raubenheimer, proprietor of the somewhat grandiose title of general manager: audience liaison, corporate affairs, SABC.

Here’s what Louis defended: the SABC’s sympathetic reply to the letter of complaint. “… I would like to state that your name was not mentioned in the above programme and that you were not linked to any of the characters or events in the programme.

“The footage was shot in a public place and the fact that you appeared in the background can never be construed as participating and/or being implicated in the subject matter of the said programme. We reserve the right to reply in detail to your letter in the correct forum should the need arise and take all and necessary action to protect and enforce our rights.”

Don’t you like that thuggish touch, “enforce our rights”? Piet Meyer must be hosing himself.

Apart from the apology, the SABC was reprimanded by the BCCSA. But in itself, the bombast of the SABC letter speaks far more eloquently of a public organisation that, when it suits it, believes itself to be immune from the codes of responsible broadcasting.

By coincidence, in the same week as the BCCSA judgement, a judge of the Cape High Court ruled as inadmissible evidence a video of a television documentary about the infamous Rashaad Staggie murder.

Judge Foxcroft said that an edited assemblage of material was not a detached depiction of the crime. Obviously the programme had used an assortment of source material. The similarity to Special Assignment’s use of such material is obvious.

I think the BCCSA was far too lenient. Speaking as an ex-BCCSA commissioner, let me offer a dissenting judgement. In this matter the SABC should have been very heavily fined as well.