The South African Broadcasting Corporation’s reporters are “pathetic”, and the broadcaster is like a patient with multiple organ failure, the founder of SAFM and a candidate for a position on the broadcaster’s board told Members of Parliament (MPs) on Friday.
“Watch the BBC when there is a breaking story,” Govin Reddy told MPs on Parliament’s portfolio committee on communications.
“They will go on camera with someone in New York. The presenter who is interviewing, interviews with absolute authority. They have done the research, they know it all. You don’t get that from the SABC. The reporters from the field are pathetic, I’m sorry to say.”
Reddy, who started the broadcaster’s radio news station SAFM in 1995, said the SABC was failing in its duty of informing and educating South Africans.
“The public broadcaster is supposed to inform and educate the SA populace. You have to speak simple language and give context and background and educate. They don’t do that. It is stories that are just blurted out.”
News readers at the SABC haven’t been trained, he said.
“News readers must be journalists. News readers must understand what they are reading. They mustn’t be repeating words. If there is an important story, they must be an expert on that subject. They must talk to you with authority.”
‘Multiple organ failure’
Reddy said he had modelled SAFM on the BBC’s Radio 4 as a high quality station, but that in recent years it had become “a cheap talk show similar to 702”.
“It was supposed to be a quality station catering to all South Africans. I wanted to have good documentaries and features, etcetera. Now it is a cheap radio talk show similar to 702.”
Reddy said he had spent five years at the SABC at executive level and understood the dynamics and politics.
“When you are experienced, have expertise, and are a little older, they tend to listen to you more,” he said.
“I think I can play a conciliatory role. I have the skills and experience and the people skills to play an interventionist role to bring various warring factions together.”
The SABC, he said, was “like a patient with multiple organ failure”.
“There is no point fixing kidneys when the lungs have also gone. You have to get everything right, but you must start somewhere. You have to get the heart pumping, before everything else. The key to a turnaround at the SABC is to have the right people. Developing that human capital would be the starting point.”
Board shortlist
Reddy said he wasn’t sure about the scale of political interference at the SABC, but said one of the “pillars” of a public broadcaster is “its independence”.
“If it is not independent then it is a state broadcaster,” he said.
“I do not know how much direct political interference there is in the SABC. I don’t have hard evidence.
“From my gut feel I don’t think there is the level of interference that there was in the National Party era where PW Botha had a direct phone line to the newsroom.”
Fourteen nominees have been shortlisted by MPs to fill four vacancies on the SABC board, created by a spate of resignations last year.
The candidates are being interviewed over three days this week. The committee is to present the names of the final four to the National Assembly on February 3. If approved, they are expected to take up their positions during the first quarter of this year.
The four posts became vacant when board members David Niddrie, Barbara Masekela, Felleng Sekha and Makgatho Mello left last October. Their exits followed months of infighting and complaints over a failure to produce a financial strategy for the cash-strapped SABC.
‘Anecdotes about their personal lives’
CEO Solly Mokoetle has also since resigned due to an “irretrievable breakdown” in the relationship between him and the public broadcaster’s board.
Reddy said the broadcaster had been “limping around” without a CEO for far too long.
“An organisation of this size and magnitude going that long without a CEO, it’s in deep crisis.”
He recommended finding a “relatively young” CEO, mentoring them and sending them to the BBC for six months or so for training.
Earlier on Friday another board candidate, Cawekazi Mahlati, laid into the broadcaster’s journalists.
She told the committee that the early morning show, Morning Live, had totally destroyed her understanding of news.
She said quite often in the middle of a news discussion presenters Leanne Manas and Vuyo Mbuli would launch into “anecdotes about their personal lives”.
“Most of us have to agree, the private eNews has a better offering as far as what news is concerned,” she said. — Sapa