The South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) inquiry into alleged blacklisting of commentators should be broadened to include bias against the official opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA) said on Wednesday.
The DA’s call comes in the wake of the Congress of South Afican Trade Union (Cosatu)’s call for the commission to probe reports of remarks allegedly made at an African National Congress media briefing — allegedly by a senior SABC personality — about the need to isolate and neutralise the Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi.
The DA’s Donald Lee said he had written to Zwelakhe Sisulu — a former SABC chief executive — to request him to widen his commission’s scope.
Lee noted that one of the commentators allegedly blacklisted was ex-SABC journalist and producer Karima Brown — now at Business Day — who wrote in Tuesday’s Business Day that there was a dominant editorial ethos at the SABC that hindered journalists from covering the DA.
Lee reported that she had cited the example of the 2005 opening of Parliament ”where Tony Leon, the leader of the opposition, had responded to Mbeki’s state of the nation address and was therefore an obvious guest. But the acting executive producer ordered that Leon be canned.”
Lee said if Sisulu refused to widen the scope of the investigation to include the SABC’s coverage of the DA, ”then he will need to explain why he is willing to ignore Karima Brown’s allegation that senior executives have interfered to keep the DA off the air”.
Lee said it was ”well-known that certain board members and executives at the SABC are vehemently anti-DA and will go out of their way to exclude the DA’s comments from its programming”.
He gave the examples of SABC board members Christine Qunta and Thami Mazwai who were ”on record expressing their contempt for the DA”.
”If some independent analysts were blacklisted by the South African Broadcasting Corporation, then it is a near certainty that certain opposition politicians have also been ‘banned’ from commenting on SABC news stories.
”The SABC’s coverage of the DA’s 2006 local election campaign was indicative of the public broadcaster’s aim to cut out the opposition. The SABC refused to cover the DA’s local election launch, despite dedicating one and half hours of air time to a live broadcast of the ANC’s election launch.”
The allegations concerning the commentators emerged in the media recently when it was reported that four people had been banned from the state broadcaster. They included Brown, Vukani Mde, Aubrey Matshiqi and William Gumede. – I-Net Bridge