Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

MAX DU PREEZ: This is a slightly different process. I mean, we did start appointing the first board. It was a very good process of public hearings, which was unheard of before. Which made a very fundamental difference.  As a working journalist with the SABC, I have never had any contact with anybody from the board.  As journalists we get no orders from anybody on the board or anywhere else.  We, I think it is fair to say, that the journalists at the SABC run their own programmes. I am not sure what the board does at the SABC. It certainly doesn't touch my life.  Maybe the bigger, broader sort of policy and financial things, but I am a journalist, I don't care about those things.  		So I can truly say, I don't even know properly who is on the board. I know a few, but in the old days who was the board.  The board chairman was for a long time also one of the top two of the Broederbond. Now we know as working journalists the SABC board now is a mixed bag. I mean, we have Arri de Beer on there and all kinds of people, except we don't even know what their political persuasion is. So there is none of this presence of the board, is an ANC or a National Party or a Broederbond.  That is very different.  My reading of the culture inside the SABC is that it plays no role.

UNKNOWN: Continued education of journalists seems to be badly needed.  What are the possibilities - already in your opening remarks you said something like you know, it is possible to have journalism and have people running a programme, irrespective of colour, class, race, but I am still - given what we have heard, it is like a lot more is needed than having good people doing it in that small corner, when it is almost impossible for others.

MAX DU PREEZ: Mr Chairman, I think one thing here, is that we should restore the public image and the public status of journalists in our society.  We don't have a high status in our society at the moment and that's our own doing.  We were spies and we were bad journalists and we were cheats.  We need to work very hard to restore that. It is not a very sought after profession in our country today. What I have seen in the last 10 years, were a lot of young talented black people entering journalism and as soon as they have the experience, they get robbed by big business or by Government, to be spokesmen or to pose a black face, because they get lots more money and more status in society. We want to, we need to again breed a new culture where it is kind of special to be a journalist. I mean, I am of the old school. It is the most exciting job in the world. It is the proudest profession in the world.  The young people don't feel like that any more.  They look at pay cheques.  If we don't get that into our culture, this is a very noble and exciting profession.  For the next 10 to 15 years we will keep on losing the new trainees to - I mean, the Truth Report Special Report, for instance, started with a young man called Zwandile Zote, who was a very good journalist and it was very nice to work with him. He was there for a month and he got an amazing offer from the State to be Public Works spokesman. I miss that guy until today. I couldn't blame him. He gets a fancy car and he has got some status in society and whatever.  We want the Zwandile Zotes of the world to want to stay even for less money.  And of course, I think there are proper journalism schools now. I hope the one at Stellenbosch will open up further.  Hopefully it will lose its exclusive Afrikaans language character, so it can serve that whole community.  But the other schools are great.  There is the Institute for Advancement of Journalism doing great work.  But I think the most - in my experience, is that the most important experience is on-the-job experience.  It is on-the-job training and especially at the SABC. But there is also another culture in our news rooms that have developed, and that is very negative, a negative facet of journalism, and it chases away a lot of young talented people, and that is the authoritarian structures of news rooms.  Whenever you see a good successful newspaper, then you can know that the journalists are trusted and that is the true, that is the situation, I think, also with the SABC, it is the situation with every newsroom that I have ever worked in.  The more you trust your journalist, the harder he or she will work and the more committed they will be, the better your journalism will be.  But we have an extremely authoritarian structure in the SABC and in every newsroom that I see around me, where you work for 10 or 15 or 20 years and then you get promoted, to drive a desk, you become a boss and you turn your whole character around and you deny everything you have done and said and thought before, and you become a boss.  And journalists, this is my old school view, any journalist who likes the boss is a bad journalist.

UNKNOWN: Thank you, Max. I will hand you over back to the Chair.

CHAIRPERSON: Mary Burton?

MARY BURTON: I would like to follow up on that and you earlier remarks about the need to have a debate and to talk among journalists about the future of the profession and I would argue that it would be critically important to draw in the media who have not been represented here in this hearing.  Because I think one of the victims of what has happened, is that there will develop in public such a degree of cynicism and lack of trust, that one gets to the stage that people will say well, I can't believe anything any more, and I think we are near that point. I think that is in a way one of the negative aspects of all of these revelations, is that people who were trusted, are now revealed to have been untrustworthy. So I think it is critically important that we do that soon and restore a degree - I think a degree of scepticism is a good thing in the reading public, but a certain degree, anyway, of faith in the responsibility of the media.  So I would encourage that debate to be ongoing.  Thank you, Chairperson.

MAX DU PREEZ: And I also would add that it is very important to draw in the Afrikaans journalists in this process.  They are alienated after - and most of them are good, the ordinary journalists are good journalists and their hearts are in the right places and they are committed.  We need desperately, I want to say this to my black colleagues, and the Forum for Black Journalists and the unions, those people are also Africans.  More so than they would admit themselves, draw them in, it is good for them and it is good for all of us.

CHAIRPERSON: Well, this is the end of our day.  I don't think we could have ended on a better note.  When Don Mattera was speaking during the course of today's proceedings, I took the view that well, that is what you can expect from an unguided missile, like Don Mattera.  Now when this Afrikaner comes and speaks to us, I don't know whether I should say this is what you can expect from an unguided missile like Max du Preez. But the one thing that is clear, is that if it had not been for the likes of you and Jacques Pauw, and the Don Matteras, but in particular, given the sort of society that you have just mentioned, people like you, Afrikaners, "verraaiers" in the view of those you socialised with, you grew up with, it must have been a terrible time to go into a bar, to go into any community of people, having known that you had just published the sort of thing that you had published in your Vrye Weekblad. Maybe you began to shun places like those, because you might be on the receiving end of knock-out drops.

MAX DU PREEZ: We don't drink, Mr Chairman.