Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

RAYMOND LOUW: Thank you.  Thank you, Mr Chairman. I would like this submission to be read in relation to the submission that we presented as part of the Freedom of Expression Institute presentations to the Truth Commission. I am thinking particularly of the over-arching document which dealt with the general situation and the history of that particular period.		I have broken this into a general submission and into details of the Rand Daily Mail and its reporting, and various events that took place during the period that I was editor of the Rand Daily Mail and general manager of South African Associated newspapers, which covers the period from 1966 to 1977 as editor, and 1977 to 1982 as general manager.	Briefly, about my career. I joined the Rand Daily Mail limited as a copy holder in the works department in 1944; joined the editorial department in '46 as a reporter, and then went off to Britain, where I worked on several newspapers, came back to South Africa in 1956 and work successively as night editor Rand Daily Mail, news editor Sunday Times, news editor of the Rand Daily Mail and then editor of the Rand Daily Mail, followed by general manager of South African Associated Newspapers, the owners, until relieved of that post in 1972.  I am now a member of the - I was a member of the executive board of the International Press Institute, from 1979 to 1987. I am now fellow of that institute and I hold various positions in civil society, mainly deputy chairman of the Freedom of Expression Institute.	I am here because I have been requested to make a submission about my role in the media during my years as editor of the Rand Daily Mail and general manager of SAAN.  	I have been requested to discuss my impressions of the situation of the media during that time, in relation to the commission of gross human rights abuses and of course, to count my experiences and conduct as a journalist that are apposite to your enquiry.	Personally one shrinks from exposure of this kind where one is expected to examine and be introspective about one's own conduct as well as that of colleagues in a very public way.  In thinking back on those years, I am reminded that the great good fortune though, that I had in working with an extraordinarily remarkable group of brave, skilled and committed journalists and colleagues on the Rand Daily Mail and its associated newspapers. In that respect I welcome this opportunity to pay tribute to their courage, loyalty and commitment to their craft in frequently difficult and extremely lonely and frightening circumstances, if not dangerous, on occasion.	They did a quite outstanding job in trying to tell the public what was going on.	I should point out that though the newspaper and the group ownership was opposed to apartheid, and though the journalists did an extraordinary job in exposing many of the evils of the system, and the sufferings it caused, when no other papers were doing this work to any large extent or to any extent at all, most of the journalists were not anti-apartheid activists as such.  They regarded themselves as journalists first.  They saw their job as gathering the news and telling readers what was going on.  Their job was to uncover the truth and to print it.  Part of the truth was the terrible deeds being committed in the name of apartheid, and these they excavated from the quagmire of government obfuscation and published.	Of course, this is a generalisation.  They were not all like that. Some, especially the black journalists were black activists first and journalists second.  But it was noticeable that in the atmosphere of a dedicated news room, their activists' tendencies were frequently sublimated by the professionalism demanded of them. The Mail with the Daily Despatch and The World and Ilangalaas in Natal, was one of the main employers of black journalists in the newspaper industry. Ensuring particularly from 1976 onwards, that black writers came into their own and were increasingly given opportunities for advancement and training.	The trend at the Mail had started earlier in the Sixties, when a black opinion column was started, with among others, the late Natnikaze as the writer.  Many of the most prestigious black editors and writers today received their early training on the Mail. Among them, SABC chief executive officer, Zwelake Sisulu, City Press editor, Kulu Sebiya and former New Nation editor, Gaba Tgwana.  There were many others such as writers Harold Pongola, Obe Musi and Doc Pakisha.  	These black journalists had it tough, and never more so when the assignment was one calculated to bring him into contact with the security forces or the authorities in some form or another.  	These were the stories about black spot removals like Morsgat and Lime Hill, stories about malnutrition, such as which appeared in Kuruman and caused two British doctors to flee the country. Demonstrations that ended in violence and death, police raids, or whatever.	It was frequently also rough for white journalists, but there was nearly always the distinction of the black journalist being arrested and manhandled, while the whites would perhaps be detained and questioned.	The Rand Daily Mail's news staff was a political and cultural mix.  Perhaps more so than other English-language newspapers.  There were English, Afrikaners, Blacks, Coloureds and occasionally Indian.  Some of the English were from the Johannesburg Northern suburbs, others from the coastal cities.  The paper had become to be regarded as the mecca for South African journalists.  Some were National Party supporters, others United Party or Progressive Party, some were Communists and some were ANC or PAC.  When I was editor I did not enquire about political sympathies. People were expected to do their jobs professionally.	Of course, there were others with their own agendas, the spies and informers, who we have heard so much about here.  We knew they were about and sometimes we thought who they were.  It turned out that in some instances we were correct. But I did not encourage spy-hunting within the newsroom because I believed it would destroy morale.  Four or five journalists approached me over a period of time and told me that they had been asked by the security police to spy on the Mail.  They wanted advice and I told them that I could not give them any.  It had to be their decision, but I did warn them that if they decided to spy, they would never be able to break free from the security police, as Mr Horak apparently discovered to his cost.	They would always be in their power. I knew I was talking to people though who had made up their minds to reject the offer, but were letting me know what their situation was, should anything happen to them.	Of course, the dilemma was who were the others, and who did not confide in me, and how many were they.  I certainly do not think they were as many as John Horak named yesterday. I interpreted his statements as trying to give the impression that spying was a kind of regular job, that everybody in the newspapers was involved in. Instead of this despicable trade that it is. 	I reject his attempt to cast a slur on the staff as a whole, with contempt.  	He also said that I confronted him on several occasions with being a spy. I presume the intention was to try and give the impression that I was quite happy that there were spies around the place, and particularly, that I knew him as a spy.	In fact, I challenged him once. The staff had told me that they were certain he was a spy. I called him in and put it to him. He denied it vigorously.  I told him that I had to accept his word. I had also had a representation from another senior member of the staff, who told me that he was quite convinced that Horak wasn't a spy. In the absence of proof there was nothing I could do about it.  Though afterwards, obviously I was very wary of him.	I thought there was very little we could do about spies.  A spy hunt would have destroyed the newsroom and the paper.  We did, however, take precautions when we were dealing with highly sensitive information.  We discussed it with the minimum of our people.  The people whom we believed in and whom we could trust, and if matters were to be discussed, we would move out of an office such as mine, which could be bugged, into the passage outside.  We sometimes took to writing notes to each other.  It sounds somewhat dramatic, melodramatic now, but after the (indistinct) in 1965, when we believed that we were being bugged in the office and in some cases in our homes, we became sensitised and cautious. Of course, it was an uncomfortable way of working and it added to the many pressures on us.	One of the more remarkable spying operations was carried out on my successor, Alistair Sparks, during the investigation of the Muldergate scandal. To his consternation he discovered that his secretary was a spy. He had become so concerned about the sensitive material his reporters were dealing with, that he arranged meetings with them at the Carlton Hotel up the road, or he made telephone calls from a hotel room, when they were overseas, so that he would not be bugged. But his secretary was privy to all the arrangements and was in a position to alert official eavesdroppers.	The climate. It was a highly pressurised environment. Newspapers with their concentration on the media scene, deadlines, generally are.  But we had always to bear in mind the array of laws that were like the spikes on thorn trees, ready to impale one in an unguarded moment. The laws hung about one like a cloud.  A list was handed in by the Freedom of Expression Institute, so I am not going to dwell upon that area.	We had plenty of examples of the authorities acting when laws were broken.  There were the bannings of left-wing publications such as New Age, Contact and Torch, early on during the National Party rule. These propagated universal franchise in an open society and suffered the consequences.	There was the harassment and frequent imprisonment or banning of their staff, and of course, the editors themselves were banned. I think some of them were charged as well.	At the other extreme there was the Daily News editor, John O'Malley and his assistant editor who were convicted for advertising or having made known a banned gathering, merely by publishing details of the gathering and when it was to take place.	An example of such as this, of the Government's rapid crackdown on whatever was considered a breach of the law, led us to believe that the authorities were itching to take action against the paper, for any breaches of the law.  Apart from the court cases, there was always the fear that the Government would ban an issue or the paper itself. 	I don't believe John Horak's story that the Government did not want to ban the Mail, because of its value to its image overseas.  It wanted to be rid of the Mail and the attempt by Louis Luyt, first to buy the paper in 1976 and then to try to cause its collapse, by introducing the Government-funded Citizen in opposition, supports that view.	If it had sufficient justification, we believed, it would ban the paper or issues of the paper. Indeed, proof came later again, in another form.  After the closure of the Mail when the Government banned the Weekly Mail, which by then had, I would have thought, gained similar diplomatic value, and New Nation.	To ensure that we did not fall foul of the law, we had lawyers constantly on call for consultation on the legal implications of stories that we intended running.  When a story containing information which was thought to be in contravention of some kind, the reporter would call the lawyer and ask his advice. Our lawyers became adept at suggesting the removal of words or terms rather than outright rejection of the story. In this regard the newspapers at SA Associated Newspapers, now Times Media Limited, are indebted to the brilliance of the late Kelsey Stewart, who was the first lawyer to specialise in media work and who devised a multitude of stratagems to enable us to go out further on the limb than we thought possible.	We saw our role as challenging the law to the maximum, to enable publication of the maximum amount of information. We did not see it as defying the law, because the consequences of such action we reckoned, would be swift.  Charges before court or other action by the Government, followed by sacking of the journalist and/or the editor and replacement of the latter by someone who would be less confrontational and possibly less keen on disclosure.	In the case of the Mail our closure would have had severe economic effects on the company, as we saw when Anglo-American misguidedly closed the paper in 1985, and the company's overdraft increased fourfold in one month, forcing it to sell its printing plant and its offices.	But despite all this, the Government constantly amended the law when loopholes were found.  At the same time the legislation was tightened-up and became increasingly more oppressive.  	We were also only too well-aware that the Government would have been delighted to, if it were presented with a breach of the law by the newspaper or the company, which had nothing to do with the editorial content, say a breach of one or more of the labour or health laws. We were conscious that if we contravened one of these, some bureaucrat could close down the paper or the building for a day or whatever.  A shut-down of several hours at a crucial time of day could stop production and cause the loss of an issue of the paper and the loss financially would have been considerable.	Because a newspaper office is also a factory, SAAN fell under the Factories Act, the Printing Industry Industrial Council regulations, the Physical Resources Act and municipal health legislation and the effects that it had on the company, and I will hand in these notes. I have taken a few pointers from it.  	He states that the point about all these laws, whether they empowered minor bureaucrats to close down operations and for compliance with the letter of the law was achieved.  They also encouraged members of the staff - and he is referring here to the rather more conservative members of the staff who were in the works department or in other, the administrative sections of the building - to oppose any liberalisation moves by management by conferring on them special rights of segregation that they could appeal to if wished them, to uphold.	The Physical Resources Act, writes Hall, governed the total number of black people we could employ, by setting the percentage of the total labour force in a factory in a white area, who could be black. We came under increasing pressure on this point as blacks were employed in the editorial, accounting, advertising and sales departments.  In these departments the Industrial Council and the conservative SA Typographical Union did not rule, but the Department of Manpower and other departments would get onto us.  	There was also some law which determined that while people of any racial group could rise to supervisory and management positions, they could only do this as long as those they supervised or managed, were of the same racial group, with the exception of course of whites.	This meant that there was a ceiling on the number of blacks who could take up jobs in the news room, but more importantly, it prevent blacks from taking up senior positions where they would have supervisory powers over whites.  	There is no doubt that had SAAN or the Mail tried to take on more blacks on the editorial staff, or elevated a black to a supervisory role over whites in the editorial department, someone in the production department, which was populated by conservative whites, would have blown the whistle and the company would have been in trouble.	Hall writes that the municipal Department of Health would respond to complaints of the employees, the conservative employees in the company, in addition to the planted informers, who objected to the removal of the race reservation signs in the toilets and wash rooms. That is in the editorial departments.  They were always intact in the works department. 	The inspectors would watch until signs were restored, and he says he would leave them up for a day or so before removing them, and then the cycle would be repeated again.	Factory inspectors did similar policing duties on the signs on the lifts, although when I questioned him about this, my impression was that the lifts at SAAN were in fact desegregated.	Hall's department introduced in 1971 a fully integrated wage and salary scale policy, and in 1974 the department published a report on the effects of three years of integrated wages and salaries on the structure and efficiency of the operation of the company.  By this time, he notes, the department had stopped keeping or submitting to the authorities statistical records of racial distribution, to ensure that salary reviews and budgeting would be based on skills, competencies and people's graded positions and not on skin colour.	By the mid-Seventies the canteen had been integrated.  In the mid-seventies the company also introduced a special training and development programme, which were eight-day residential courses held in venues out of town, which did not object to the non-racial component of the courses.  	Though the law required strikes by black workers to be reported to the police, Hall says that this was not done, and when the police heard of a strike and enquired, he denied that there was a strike, but admitted that there was a heavy rate of absenteeism. 	A personal letter was addressed to each MWASAemployee who was engaged in the strike to point out a position which would have prevented the worker from being arrested and jailed for taking part in an illegal strike.	The wording of the letter related to an absence from duty.	We promoted three journalists to head the township team of reporters.  The township reporting team was a group of reporters who worked on what was called the township edition, which went to mainly Soweto and to other townships around the Witwatersrand. Those reporters were black reporters.	Anyway, we promoted three journalists to head the township team of reporters. But it did not work out.  One Lawrence Mayekiso asked to be relieved of the position after six months, because I was told, and I am not altogether sure of how accurate this is, but this is what I was told, he was intimidated either by members of the staff or the many freelancers who sought jobs.  He feared for his life. 	At first African or township reporters were housed in a separate room but later when open planning was introduced, they were placed in a section of the general news room.  The reason was, like the sub-editors, sports features or finance departments, it was more efficient for reporters working on a dedicated section of the paper, to be grouped together around their news editor.		In recent weeks black journalists have complained about being forced to eat out of enamel plates and mugs.  At SAAN there was an efficient editorial chapel which dealt with staff complaints.  If reporters had been subjected to this treatment, they should have raised it with the chapel.  MWASA members refused to join the chapel, but when they raised it with the news editor of their section, the complaint was attended to.	The news editor of the township edition assured me that they have no recollection of their staff being forced to use other than the crockery available to all the others in the news room.	The chapel would also have been the forum for them to take up their allegations that their copy had been stolen by colleagues, who sold their material under their own bylines to overseas papers. The practice of stringers for overseas newspapers, milking newsroom copy for despatch overseas, had been in operation for many years, and white reporters, as well as blacks complained about it. It was impossible to stop, because it had become ingrained in the news room. Stringers claimed that they had picked up the information, if one did challenge them, stringers claimed that they had picked up the information from other sources.  The evening papers, the radio or their own contacts. They also claimed that they had access to the London papers, knew what they wanted and how copy should be written for them and those papers would not accept copy from reporters they did not know.	Of course, there is the question of compensation that they should have perhaps paid, but that never seemed to get anywhere, apart from saying yes, I will think about it.	Editing the Rand Daily Mail was a challenge, when one was faced with the super policeman like hardline Prime Minister John Balshazzar Vorster, with his ever eagle Lieut-Gen Hendrik J van der Berg, whom Vorster appointed to head up BOSS.  In a moment of candour Van der Berg sent a chill down people's spines by stating that the men of BOSS would kill for him.	The repressive laws were piling up. South Africa entered the war against SWAPO in Angola and suppression of news became ever more intense.	My battle was easily defined against the forces of the apartheid regime.  Though the company's board of directors had always been nervous of the Mail's crusading against apartheid, the company chairman, when I became editor, Cecil Payne, was a tower of strength.  Though not a newspaper man, he was an accountant.  He quickly adopted the rules of good journalism and gave his editors editorial freedom.  He was the subject of a barrage of criticism from businessmen, some politicians and others.  But then the atmosphere changed.  Payne was succeeded by Ian McPherson, who had made his fortune looking after the interests in South Africa of US mining magnate, Charles Engelhardt, and Payne became deputy chairman.  McPherson had links with Cabinet Ministers, especially Finance Minister Owen Horwood and he was connected in a small way with the Info Scandal, although that only came to light later.  He was the meeter and greeter, the classic go-between in whatever deal required smooth talk. He did not like the Rand Daily Mail's liberal viewpoint or its crusading spirit, certainly not its contrariness and rebelliousness.  	As he settled in his seat I found slowly but perceptively, the pressures beginning to mount inside the company.  	Then as the mid-1970s arrived the battle was on two fronts. One, somewhat straightforward against Vorster, the security system and the National Party Government and the other against the machinations of McPherson. 		Eventually in 1977 McPherson, at the head of a board, frightened by the Soweto uprising and confronted with the Info Scandal, Citizen about to be launched in competition with the Mail, fired me.  The process had been started some two years earlier with the softening up period.  Every two months I would ride with managing director, Lester Walton to McPherson's office, where we would discuss how the paper had handled the more dramatic news.  Or one could ascribe as the news bugging the government over the previous few weeks.	McPherson asked questions, but never acknowledged whether he had understood or accepted the answers.  The board clearly felt that a conservative Citizen would harm the Mail and increase its losses.  The Mail had gone into a loss situation about 1975. I was kicked upstairs to become general manager and there I was left to rot for a while.  	It was clear in my mind that the firing was political and that the board was not only frightened but angry.  Walton told me at one stage that the mood of the board is to throw me out of the place. I had upset them by writing a front page leader some months earlier, about an attempt by Louis Luyt to by SAAN and turn the mail into a Government-supporting paper.  The editorial staff was alarmed, I was angry at the prospect of a sell-out to the Government and the leader reflected those concerns, in very blunt terms.	I was told that the board was very angry, but it was not cited as the reason and I have now lost the rest of them, for my departure.