Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

PAT SIDLEY: I will pick up where Sam left off, there is something which I want to say though which is not mandated by the Union, which is my view but which I feel very strongly about and since we are here, and that in the debate that ensued about whether or how the media should be enquired into at the Truth Commission.	In my opinion a great disservice was done to a number of individuals and a couple of institutions and my own feeling about that is that there were many, some of whom are here today, who did do a great deal, these are - I'm talking about my colleagues and an editor or two, who did do a great deal to open up thought processes in the public mind to people who were particularly closed during those years, and their role has gone more than somewhat diminished, in my opinion, and I would hope that at some point the record gets to be set straight for that.	I came into journalism in 1978, the Union had already by then de-racialised or de-registered.  The legacy, however, was with us.  I came into a racially polarised newsroom and I remain in racially polarised newsrooms, not a great deal on the ground has changed.  In some places it has, in others it hasn't.	During the years of the Union's attempt to steer a path through - it was a very difficult time within the Union to organise, in the 1980's when I came into it we had a path to steer between bringing a very conservative membership along with us and trying to do what was morally and politically the right thing while concentrating on the stuff that unions did concentrate on which was wages and working conditions.  Most of us in the leadership of the Union were informed by a notion that wages and working conditions could not be seen in isolation from the politics of the time, you simply couldn't be a journalist if you couldn't do your profession adequately and of course we couldn't pursue our professions adequately with apartheid's system of censorship and with the rest of the repressive mechanisms that ensured that none of us had anything to do with anybody else's lives.	We were all acutely aware of that and we all then had to try and organise a union which would work to our members' benefit and steer a decent moral path. That in its day was very difficult.	Looking back at it there were some amusing incidents.  An attempt for instance of the SASJ's rather white leadership to meet what was then Mwasa's black leadership in an environment where some members would have taken a dim view of the meeting. The meeting was held in order to try and clarify how our relationship would work in the workplace.  It took place in the downstairs portion of the Methodist Church in the centre of town away from anybody being able to see it in case any other meaning was attributed to it, but really what it was an attempt to work together ...(tape ends)....platforms publicly and internationally.  I would be sitting next to colleagues from Mwasa and Mwasa would be very critical, quite naturally, of white journalists' behaviour.  We accepted that criticism because it applied, but it did get to be a very uncomfortable process of trying to steer a path in our newsrooms.  	At the same time we had the same problems everybody else did of trying to deal with what the law was doing to us, to our colleagues to whom we owed some support and what it was doing to our editors who were becoming increasingly conservative and polarising even the white staff into different camps of how to deal with the situation.	By the end of the time the Rand Daily Mail was closed down the polarisation manifested rather in the form of what then became the alternative press versus the mainstream press and I went off into the alternative press, I joined the Weekly Mail and I became a foreign correspondent because it was more-or-less the only way you could earn a living if you were at the Weekly Mail.	During that time we obviously had to take up the issues of what the state of emergency was doing to us.  I don't think I need to go through what the state of emergency did to everybody because you have heard that in many other forms, but among journalists it had some astonishing manifestations which simply weren't dealt with adequately in the mainstream press either by the managements editors or some of our own colleagues who we would watch from the sidelines having a particularly rough time.  	For instance in Oudtshoorn, now you've heard about Oudtshoorn, you had an event hearing in Oudtshoorn so you will have heard about the most extraordinary times that people had in Bridgetown, in the coloured township and a lot of the focus was around Saamstaan, but the staff of Saamstaan had gone through an absolutely astonishing time trying to produce a newspaper in which everybody, down to the people who delivered the newspaper at some time or another, were detained.  That fell on a few of us in the alternative press and in some of the other organisations that were set up at the time like ACAG and our Union, the SAUJ to try and assist, which was quite difficult.	We also had to attempt to steer a path of what the State had done to people's mindsets.  Journalists who were detained quite clearly couldn't have been just doing the business of journalists, they must have been involved in politics and in some people's minds that was a crime and journalists shouldn't defend them.  That was aside from the fact that the State at the time was saying that it was detaining some of them because they were writing.  And it was Stoffel Botha I think who said that about, among others, Zwelaki when he was in prison.  They didn't want to let people out who could write.	We had a particular problem that you will hear more about later today if your programme is reflected in reality, that was spies and it was very difficult to steer a path through that.  We worked with and around people who were obviously getting several pay cheques at once.  It was done in the cause of getting information for the State, it was also done in the cause of, presumably, disrupting certain journalists' lives as well, and my assumption has been that several of the spies we had in our newsrooms in fact informed the process of detaining of certain journalists during that period.  	And I know that there is a view that there might have been more drastic use of information given, for instance in the raid in Lesotho.  That might have led to the death of certain people.	You are going to hear from one of the spies in the newsroom later today but we made several attempts to try and get him out of our news system, and that was John Horak.  Our management seemed to believe that that was not possible unless you provided proof of two pay cheques and kept him there and he did very nicely on our backs.	I believe though the unfortunate legacy that we have now I don't share Sam's view that we are any closer together, I think we are much further apart than we ever were.  I would hope that something might come out of this process by which we could find some meeting place, but the newsrooms that I have been working in illustrate a lack of meetings, meeting of minds and it's a legacy of not just apartheid but of our inabilities to deal adequately with some of that and there is now a great philosophical gap between how some groups of people view the news as opposed to how others do, and how we deal with our craft.  That is manifesting in different organisations.	I am not certain if I can add anymore to what you already have in our presentation, but ask away.