There has been a good deal of strutting and fretting already, but the drama over the Films and Publications Amendment Bill will end up in a deal that leaves essentially intact the existing regime of controls on expression.
That is a pity, and not just for the media.
In terms of the 1996 Films and Publications Act, every sequence of moving images must be submitted to the board for classification before it can be distributed. Print publications must also be sent for classification if they contain images or written descriptions of sex.
The Films and Publications Board either forbids things outright (sexual violence, bestiality, violence that constitutes incitement to harm), restricts their distribution to licensed premises (graphic depictions of sex), or sanctions broader release, perhaps with age restrictions.
Newspapers and broadcasters, of course, are exempted from classification and operate free of state scrutiny.
It hardly seems likely that this process, controlled by people who owe their salaries to the minister of home affairs, meets constitutional requirements for freedom of expression. If it works reasonably well, that is because members of the board are an underwhelming bunch, with fairly blunt scissors, who have not previously explored the limits of their mandate.
Unfortunately, they seem to have grown frustrated with a quiet life, reading smut and classifying those confusingly scary Harry Potter films, and they have branched out into writing legislation.
The new Bill aims to provide more effective instruments against child pornography or to protect children from legitimate pornography (the drafters are confused about this distinction).
It addresses the first objective by outlawing the depiction of sex involving children, and the second by trying to respond to technological changes that have multiplied the channels through which pornography is available.
And then, flushed with a kind of legislative rapture, it ends the exemption. That is clearly a mistake. It would be both impracticable and unconstitutional to pre-screen the media.
Everyone knows this: the presidency, the committee and the parliamentary legal team. But home affairs portfolio committee chairperson Patrick Chauke is engaged in minor skirmishes of his own and Parliament is under pressure to project a façade of independence, so we must go through the motions regardless.
The media have played along with the charade, anxiously arguing that we should be allowed to keep our special status.
The theory is that the committee will maintain the exemption in some form and we will go back to fighting for press freedom in the defamation courts where we belong.
That is a mistake. The exemption was originally agreed between editors and the apartheid government. Newspapers avoided pre-censorship by the state in return for an agreement that they would not push the limits — effectively, they would censor themselves.
The apology Chauke extracted from the tabloid Daily Voice for its editorial judgement and his repeated pummelling of e.tv over its late-night soft-porn schedule suggests that he has a similar approach in mind. Show contrition, and behave, and you will get your exemption back.
We should not acquiesce in this approach: constitutional rights do not flow from the largesse of Parliament.
Instead, the media and civil society should be asking whether the existing laws, passed several months before the Constitution, can withstand constitutional scrutiny.
Our courts have made it clear that limits on press freedom, and particularly prior restraints on publication, can only be considered when some very high hurdles are cleared, but they have not yet had to deal with the more troublesome kinds of speech protected by the Constitution.
In any event, there is more to freedom of expression than freedom of the media. What about the activist who shoots a cellphone video of police brutality and sends it out by SMS? Or the blogger who writes about her sex life? Or the filmmaker who wants to say something about teenage sexuality? And, indeed, what about the pornographer? Should they all submit to the pre-judgement of the censor or just some of them? And what kind of censor might the Constitution allow?
It is trite to point out that freedom of expression does not automatically trump other rights, but to develop workable limits on potentially harmful speech compatible with the Bill of Rights requires the kind of robust social and legal debates that we have hardly begun to have.
Principled opposition to this Bill, rather than a deal to preserve the status quo, would be a start.
Nic Dawes is associate deputy editor