President Thabo Mbeki devoted a large part of his speech to the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) on Friday to criticising the behaviour and ownership of the media.
Speaking in Pniel, outside Stellenbosch, where the NCOP was holding a provincial sitting as part of its programme of taking Parliament to the people, he emphasised that the government has ”absolutely no intention to limit press freedom”.
But he pointed out that in the past few months many South Africans would have seen strong suggestions from sections of the media that the government was bent on destroying media freedom.
”A few of these have even attempted to make comparisons with the repugnant apartheid government, which in 1977 banned a number of publications, including the World and the Weekend World,” he said.
He told his audience that these suggestions arose because of two matters: the consideration of the Film and Publications Amendment Bill currently before the NCOP, and the theft of medical records of Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, which ended up in the hands of the Sunday Times.
On the first he said that because the government must deal firmly with the scourge of child pornography, they are ”are engaged in what have turned into protracted discussions with representatives of the media”.
Referring to the police investigation into what happened to the medical records of health minister, he said that when a case of theft of medical records was investigated, the government was accused of threatening media freedom.
”If people steal they must expect the full brunt of the law, irrespective of status in society,” he said. ”Let me state this clearly, it is not necessary for the government and the president to tell the police to do their work — they know their responsibility with regard to crime.”
He said that deepening the debate on the transformation of the country meant obligatory questions must be asked that touched on the ownership, production and distribution of the means of information, as well as the consumption patterns of ideas in public debate.
”Critically, the key issue of the production, distribution and consumption patterns of ideas on the national stage is necessarily compounded by the unique character of our society,” the president said, ”which, shaped by the history of colonialism and apartheid, is marked by glaring inequalities in the ownership patterns, literacy capital and ,in many ways, access to information.”
He asked why the framing of public discussion should be an almost exclusive monopoly of ”certain groups”; and he wondered whether the country had the means and the will to ensure that the production of ideas was a process that served the interest of all South Africans as well as advancing the agenda of transformation. — I-Net Bridge