/ 16 February 2011

Making news, not sausages

Making News

Remember the old days of the sycophantic SABC? Piet Meyer in control, current affairs with Alexander Steward, PW Botha calling the broadcaster, ordering it to bow to his instructions, Cliff Saunders’s interminable lollipop interviews with Pik Botha — a world presented in the image of the National Party.

That is why the Constitution, so proudly passed in 1996, provided, in terms of section 192, that national legislation must establish an independent authority to regulate broadcasting in the public interest and to ensure a diversity of views broadly representing South African society.

The Constitution proclaimed: never again, not only to racism and sexism, but to mind control by the state and the subversion of our democratic right to hear and be heard. That is why the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) was formed to regulate broadcasting in the public interest and to ensure fairness and a diversity of views, as required by section 192 of the Constitution.

The enabling legislation also gave access to citizens who wished to complain that breaches of this obligation had taken place. Hence the establishment of a complaints and compliance committee of Icasa, mandated to investigate and make findings, where appropriate, on such complaints.

It has not taken long for the SABC to revert to its old type. True, it hired some first-rate broadcasters such as John Perlman and Pippa Green, but they were contrary to purpose. Along came our Bulgarian PhD, Dr Snuki Zikalala, who knew how to return to the erstwhile SABC practice of avoiding a plurality of opinion in its broadcasts.

He policed the news broadcasts about the 2005 Zimbabwe elections to eradicate critical opinion, forbade the airing of the views of civil society, including those held by Elinor Sisulu and Moeletsi Mbeki, and banned Archbishop Pius Ncube. He sought to discipline an SABC reporter, Mandla Zembe, who had reported that the then premier of KwaZulu-Natal, S’bu Ndebele, had been pelted with plastic bottles and other objects at a rally because it contradicted Ndebele’s denial of the incident.

The news policeman
Zikalala played news policeman with relish. He blacklisted a number of political commentators, including Karima Brown, Aubrey Matshiqi, Trevor Ncube and Paula Slier, in addition to his “Zimbabwe list”.

The Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) brought a complaint about these attacks on free and fair broadcasting to the complaints and compliance committee of Icasa. This was done after the board of the SABC ignored the findings of an independent commission of inquiry that had upheld the substance of these allegations against Zikalala. So much for a board that was to ensure the SABC fulfilled its mandate. But worse was to come. The Icasa committee dismissed the complaint on the most tendentious of grounds (of which more soon), forcing the FXI to seek a review from the courts.

In upholding the review, Judge CJ Claassen was rightly scathing of the committee’s reasoning. The committee had sought to do two things to make the complaint go away. First, it claimed that Icasa had jurisdiction only over the product and not the preparation of programmes.

Because it decided that Zikalala’s conduct was targeted at the preparation of programmes, as opposed to the finished product that was broadcast, and the preparation of programmes falls within the guarantees afforded in terms of the charter of the SABC to enjoy freedom of expression and journalistic independence, it was only the board of the SABC that could deal with any issues of preparation. In its contorted view, the committee could deal only with the product actually broadcast, not how it got made.

If you are outraged by this absurd reasoning, don’t worry, the judge wasn’t fooled. As he said: “If correct, it would mean that the SABC may with impunity manipulate and distort the preparation of its news and current affairs coverage and publicly lie about it when they are caught out having done so. It is the lying about such pre-screening shenanigans and the shameful protection of the SABC of the personnel responsible that needed to be investigated and rectified, if found proven.”

Claassen found that “a broadcaster, who deliberately skews and distorts the production in the pre-broadcast stage of its programmes in pursuit of an illegitimate ulterior purpose, inevitably produces an end-product that is biased”. Unlike sausages, we need to know how our news gets made.

The compliance and complaints committee also tried to argue that because the SABC is not subject to Icasa’s code of conduct, which seeks to give content to section 10(1)(d) of the Broadcasting Act (which provides that the SABC’s public service must be unbiased, impartial and independent of government or commercial interests), these principles somehow are not enforceable by the committee on the SABC. As Claassen said, “this reasoning is absurd in that section 10(1)(d) is directly applicable to the SABC, whatever the code of conduct may say”.

The upshot is that the committee has been ordered to hear the matter again. That neither they nor the board felt compelled to do anything about Zikalala’s attempt to achieve “tyranny of the mind”, and the “crass manipulation” of the SABC’s news and current affairs, is compelling evidence that we are still denied the free flow of ideas and information by our public broadcaster.

Thanks to Claassen, perhaps the latest board will now understand the meaning of independent broadcasting.