Special Hearings — Media Hearings — 1997-09-15

JONATHAN PROCTOR: I haven't prepared a written summary so I'll just do it from the top of my head, also in terms of
preparing the submission that I made I had no access to any of the documentation in the Broadcasting Corporation
 so a lot of the information comes from memory and you should accept it as such.  If perhaps at the outset I could 
say to the Archbishop that he got me into many, many spots of hot water because he was often on our news and for 
some reason or other he offended the powers that be and so I was often called and there were many complaints 
Archbishop, however, you seemed to make the news quite regularly.  My name is Jonathan Proctor.  I grew up 
in Cape Town.  I went to the University of Cape Town where I started teaching and I was offered a job during my sabbatical 
to teach at the University of Bophutatswana.  I wasn't particularly interested in leaving Cape Town at that stage, as 
most Capetonians are, however the military authorities had been knocking on my door for some time and my explanation 
of studies and so forth were wearing a bit thin and they advised me that unless I applied for conscientious objector 
status I would be expected to report for duty.  I didn't feel that I qualified as a conscientious objector and so felt that 
I couldn't go via that route.  However, a number of other academics had moved outside the so-called borders of 
South Africa to Homelands and at the beginning of 1984 I did exactly the same thing.  When the Military asked me 
to report for duty I advised them that when I returned to Cape Town I would advise them as such.  When I arrived 
at the University of Bophutatswana I was in a teaching department and the Vice-Chancellor of the university at that 
stage, Professor John McKenney(?) was in the process of converting the University from an American school based 
system to a faculty system and because of my particular specialisation in the management of creative and intellectual 
environments he asked me if I would assist in that process.  While I was assisting in the conversion of the university 
school-based system to a faculty-based system part of our contract for working at the university was that we had
 to do a certain amount of community service every week in our area of specialisation.  Two sort-of community jobs
 came my way.  The one was setting up the administrative procedures for a consumer council, and the other was for 
a cultural trust called Mobana Cultural Trust Foundation.    After completing those two jobs I was called to the 
office of the Minister of Posts and Telecommunication, a gentleman by the name of Clement Sahume who asked 
me if I would help him fix the Department of Broadcasting at that stage.  I wasn't particularly enthusiastic because I had already said to John McKenney that I was getting out of step with my academic background and that I want to go back to my academic department as soon as possible.  However he made it quite clear to me that this was a request that I couldn't turn down and that he certainly was not going to oppose that, and I also realised that unless I complied I would land up back in Cape Town rather rapidly.  At that stage military conscription was still in place so I agreed to get stuck in for six months, fix the department and then go back to the university.  I made two conditions to Clement Sahume and that was, firstly, that a State department of broadcasting was completely out of step with the way broadcasting operated on a global scale, and secondly if I was to do this he had to undertake to protect the organisation from State interference as far as possible. He agreed to these two conditions and I got stuck in.  What I found was a polarised organisation.  Some of the people working in the organisation were clearly sympathisers of the Homelandsystem and government and others were just pure professional broadcasters who had actually escaped the slavish racism of the SABC.  I was very impressed by the professionalism of these gentlemen who really had wanted to make a difference and who really hated the fact that they couldn't work at the SABC because of the extreme racism here. Within a short space of time, and those of you who are broadcasters amongst us will know that once you start working in the broadcasting environment and it gets into your system there is very little escape, you really can't get out of it.  It's extremely addictive and it's not an environment that you can leave with ease.    The six months sort-of trundled into a year and basically in the first few years of my operation there the level of interference from the State was quite mundane to say the very least, complaints about the fact that you had received too much air time or that...  One of the first things we did for example was, when we were reporting matters relating to the ANC instead of putting the letters ANC up on the screen I asked the news room if they would go and find file footage of Nelson Mandela as a living, breathing human being as opposed to something that people had never seen before.  And all these things we did and they didn't seem to be too many complaints.  However, in order to make the organisation more independent of the State we had to improve its revenue base and in order to improve its revenue base we had to rely on an agreement that was signed between the Mmabatha authorities and the Pretoria authorities and this agreement related to the re-broadcasting of Bop Broadcasting into Soweto.  And the agreement went only the lines that this signal was only allowed to reach people who could speak Setswana.  Now this was totally laughable to try and make a radio wave choose who it's going to go to and who it isn't going to go to and so I used this agreement to great effect to embarrass the Department of Home Affairs into trying to get broader coverage.  Because with broader coverage in what was then the PWV we would have improved our revenue base to the point that we wouldn't have been dependent on the fiscus.  However, the sort-of slavish attention to apartheid detail set the Home Affairs Department into a research cycle which tried to find out some way in which they could make sure that Bop TV only got to people who could speak Setswana, apart from the fact that they argued that people that spoke Setswana only lived to the south of Johannesburg in Soweto and the more I proved to them that people that spoke Setswana lived everywhere we didn't really get too far with that.  Also then because we weren't making the kind of progress that we really needed to make and we started getting more and more letters from the "South African Embassy" in Mmabatho complaining about our programme content - you need to remember that at this stage the SABC never, ever broadcast any programmes that showed black people in any superior position.  There were no programmes ever broadcast on television that showed black people kissing white people and so forth, and we did this.  We broadcast all these programmes, the world didn't come to an end and in fact our audiences grew exponentially.  We just delivered highly professional programming that people enjoyed.  And what was happening was that Auckland Park was becoming increasingly more embarrassed by the fact that programming was available internationally that they could acquire, like the Cosby show, which they refused to show, and we showed it very successfully.  We started broadcasting talk shows like the Arsinia(?) Hall show and so forth.    This, I believe, was one of the sort-of founding problems.  While we were broadcasting in the Homeland there wasn't any problem. The moment we wanted to broadcast to a broader audience, and our interest was not political at all, it was purely financial and that was if we could be independent of the State we would have less State interference in what we were doing.  I also discovered during the process that I had large disagreements with two gentlemen.  The one was the director of television and the other one was head of news.  They both related to a sort-of more approach to news presentation, and both of these gentlemen led me to believe that they were not prepared to "liberalise the news" because they lived under constant threat of intimidation.    After a year or so of trying to assure them that I would do my best to protect them - at one instance I actually suggested to the head of news that if he was so unhappy with his job as head of news he could move into a new position which was going to be created to start developing drama in Setswana and what we would do is find a new head of news.  I thought this would be my opportunity to find somebody slightly more liberal.  I hadn't discussed this with anybody other than him, and within five minutes of that discussion I was called over the road to who was then, to Minister Masila's office, who was then the Minister of Broadcasting, Posts and Telecommunication and told in no uncertain terms that I was to leave this man alone completely.  It was then that I realised that in fact his protestations of intimidation had very little to do with intimidation and much more to do with his loyalty to serving the interests that he was there to serve.  Anyway notwithstanding all of that we had sufficiently embarrassed the Home Affairs Department into taking us seriously and we had started broadcasting into the rest of Africa.  Basically we felt that that was an alternative source of revenue and if the process of negotiating this ridiculous agreement was going to take some time that we should look for other sources of revenue.    To a large extent Bop TV was very well received in the rest of Africa and we started receiving huge bag fulls of mail.  We did interesting things like rang CNN, the only sort-of news service that was a 24 hour service at that stage back-to-back with our prime time programming and at the height of one of the Middle Eastern wars Bop TV and CNN was the only source of information for people sitting at home as to what was really going on since all the other news services had been cut off at a regional level.  This interest in having the Faraday cage removed from the Brixton tower here and making sure that the signal could be reached by a wider audience and thereby unlocking almost R350 million which would have flowed into the advertising or revenue account of Bop Broadcasting, along with the fact that our - not march into Africa, but our really big welcome into Africa and the fact that I had started meeting with Pallo Jordan it was obvious to us at the time that we had a fiduciary duty to our organisation to make sure that we explained our activities to - who was obviously going to be the next government.    I think that really got us into the kind of hot water which resulted in a number of my colleagues and myself being severely harassed for a very long time, our lives threatened, our eventual suspension and in certain circumstances incarceration.   That really is in a nutshell basically covers my period of office.  Obviously I am deeply concerned about the fact that as the head of the organisation I perhaps could have and should have done more to make sure that what happened to my colleagues was more limited than it was and to them I really would like to apologise that I perhaps didn't do more when perhaps I could have.    And also to our viewers and listeners we did try to give you as unbiased a service as possible but to a large extent most news services are interfered with.  If they are not interfered with officially, which I tried to limit through my office making sure that government communications were official they certainly were interfered with unofficially where one or two individuals were leaned on or were appointed years and years ago and they are there for years and sort-of carry out the instructions of their masters and when you try and move these people it becomes almost impossible to do that.  However, I would also like to say that people like Richard Magate and Tau Matau diluted these effects, so certainly while we probably weren't as powerful, and didn't make as big an impact on the whole process as the SABC did, I think that perhaps in the final analysis our contribution was perhaps a little more positive than negative.