The African National Congress turned down an invitation to attend a debate on media freedom hosted by the University of South Africa in Pretoria on Tuesday.
Organiser Julie Reid announced at the start of the debate that she had sent numerous letters to the ANC requesting it send a representative to Unisa’s “Big Media Debate”.
ANC national spokesperson Jackson Mthembu wrote in a letter on October 6 that the ANC would not participate in the debate until after Parliament had debated the proposed media appeals tribunal.
“The ANC national general council held in Durban took a decision to forward the input on media appeals tribunal discussion to Parliament for parliamentary processes. We will be able to participate in debates after the parliamentary processes have unfolded,” he wrote.
Reid said she found it difficult to understand the ANC decision not to participate in the debate.
The Democratic Alliance’s Lindiwe Mazibuko said there were currently many avenues where relief could be sought from bad journalism.
She said that President Jacob Zuma’s claim that the tribunal would help to protect the poor from the media was unfounded. He had not provided a single example in which the poor had been misrepresented by the media or failed to gain redress from the press ombudsmen.
She said there was a danger that the ANC was making the debate one of “the elite intellectuals versus the ordinary people”.
South Africans had a constitutional right to know how their government was performing and the proposed Protection of Information Bill would limit that right, she argued.
Professor Danie Du Plessis, head of the Unisa Department of Communication Sciences, said that the debate over the tribunal had a tendency to overshadow the debate on the Protection of Information Bill.
All subject to same laws
The debate over the two proposed Bills were affecting how journalism schools were training their students, and Unisa planned to include the debate in future studies, he said.
Wits Radio Academy head Professor Franz Kruger said that journalists were subject to the same laws as South Africans.
There was confusion between law and ethics, with law “determining the minimum standard” while ethics “set the bar”.
“Ethical standards are not standards that you can legislate against,” he said, and these were the standards that were set by self regulation.
The Freedom Front Plus’s Pieter Mulder said he was disappointed that the ANC had not sent someone to take part in the debate.
He described the proposed tribunal as a “red light” for the country’s democracy.
A tribunal could never be independent because it would be appointed by the government, he said.
He pointed out that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe had used legislation from former Rhodesian leader Ian Smith to gain control of that country’s media. – Sapa