The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has rejected claims by the Congress of the People (Cope) that it had sabotaged the broadcast of the party’s final rally.
”The SABC strongly rejects the notion that the Congress of the People’s Polokwane rally on Sunday was not covered,” said SABC spokesperson Kaizer Kganyago in a statement on Monday.
”SABC News further rejects insinuations that this alleged blackout would have been influenced by political motives.”
Earlier Cope’s communications chief Phillip Dexter accused the SABC of sabotage and ”blatant bias” in connection with coverage of the party’s final election rally in Polokwane.
”The SABC has been blatantly biased and used such obvious techniques to firstly change the time of speeches by Cope leaders,” Dexter said.
”Then when Cope obliged and shifted the times of these speeches in accordance with the SABC’s wishes the public broadcaster then claimed to have suffered a technical hitch and as a result zero coverage of the Cope rally was aired Sunday night,” he said.
Kganyago said the Cope rally was covered from 2pm on SABC.
”There were technical glitches during the coverage which prompted our crew to resort to back-up measures such as using a single camera.
”For some time, viewers could only get the audio while our technicians were busy fixing the error.”
Nevertheless, the coverage continued and was also supplemented by coverage in news bulletins of Sunday evening, said Kganyago.
He said as a further ”goodwill gesture” the segment was re-broadcast on Monday morning.
With the ”formidable” logistics of covering all the major political parties, it was inevitable that there would be some glitch at some time.
”As it were, we also experienced a blackout during our coverage of the DA [Democratic Alliance] rally as well,” Kganyago said.
”Our resources were stretched to the limit. However, we are satisfied that viewers and radio listeners were able to catch all major parties’ closing statements.”
Kganyago said by law the SABC was expected to provide coverage to parties proportional to their representation in Parliament.
”We consider it unfortunate that Cope would see it fit to attack the SABC on the ”bias” when they have received coverage that they were legally not entitled to in the first place.”
Nevertheless, said Kganyago, the SABC had decided to give coverage to Cope as a ”service to audiences” to provide them with a full picture of the political landscape.
He said while the technical glitches were ”unfortunate and regrettable”, they were not an indication of any biased coverage of the elections. — Sapa