Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

RAYMOND LOUW: I would say that may be referring to other newspapers, but not the Rand Daily Mail. We agonised over that. We had considerable difficulty, because there was the law of supporting a banned organisation, which made it a little difficult to in fact adopt a position of great sympathy with the liberation movements.  One could deal with it, of course, by leading articles, in terms of their posture as a liberation movement, shall we say in technical terms, one can deal with it.  But one had to be rather careful that one didn't go overboard and then be accused of supporting the liberation movements.	On the terminology, we had great difficulty with the terminology because they were Cabinet Ministers who were using the term terrorists consistently, and we had - if we quoted a Cabinet Minister, we used the term "terrorists". When we referred to ANC MK soldiers, we referred to them as guerillas. I am not quite sure though when that policy came into being.  But it must have been in the late - well, it would have been in the - about the mid-sixties, that we referred to them as guerillas, terrorists when we were quoting Cabinet Ministers and we were quoting the Cabinet Ministers as saying terrorists and then we said that if they committed the act of terrorism, such as blowing up a supermarket or something like that, we referred to it as the guerillas committing an act of terrorism. But we did not call them terrorists all the time.  	You know, one of the points of these accusations that have been made against, particularly the Rand Daily Mail, and the "conservative liberal white Press", is that there is little chapter and verse ever brought with these allegations.  It would be very helpful to us to have before us a cutting or several cuttings showing this sort of thing.But that's my recollection and I have tried that out on quite a number of staff members, to ensure that my recollection is not faulty on this subject.

CHAIRPERSON: Any other questions?

MR LEWIN: Sir, could I just ask a couple of questions arising out of points that have been put to us.  One this morning was that this business arising out of the Factory Act of not allowing or of not making promotions for people because it would avoid censure from the Government. You say that this would be to keep you out of trouble.  Do you recollect at any stage whether you ever tried this and to see what trouble would result?

RAYMOND LOUW: No, I don't think we ever tried it. I have read to you the relevant portion of the legislation that applied.  I don't think that we were encouraged by the fact that we appointed four black people as news editors of the township edition and the thing not working out. I don't think that we felt like persevering with any such thing, particularly in the light of the legislation. I think the quote to you this morning was the fact that I had said in a television programme that we had colluded, as the management and the policy, not to appoint black journalists to positions of authority. That is so totally wrong. I made no reference to a policy at all.  What I said was that the law prevented us from doing it, and I didn't go any further than that.	There would have been no point in the managements of the newspapers, taking a policy decision to abide by the law.  They would have made a policy decision, probably to break it.

MR LEWIN: That was never discussed?

RAYMOND LOUW: But it was never pursued on the basis of promoting black people into positions where they had authority over white staffers, in my time in the news room. I think it did happen after that, during - Alistair Sparks promoted John Mojopelo to deputy news editor in the newsroom, where he would have been giving instructions to staff, white staff members, but that was after my time.

MR LEWIN: And the other point that has come up, in a number of submissions, is the question of these extras or the black editions or the township editions. What is your feeling about that now?

RAYMOND LOUW: My feeling is that they were a great success, and that they were read avidly by the people that they were intended for.  Now I have had that thrown at me about "apartheid" editions of newspapers ever since we started the township edition.  But we had, if you want to take the analogy a little bit further, we had an apartheid edition for Pretoria and another one for the East and West Rand, another one for the country. They were all separate editions designed to reach certain readerships. Nobody ever complained about those editions being, shall we say, segregated from the main edition. It was a perfectly normal newspaper practice to in fact, present editions of the publication to various areas, under different names and secondly, with material which appeals to those particular audiences.	Now the township edition has got this or attracted this opprobrium because it is a black edition.  It started off as a very small edition and it started off with rather innocuous black news, but became more and more political as we went on and as the readership developed.  It did also increase in size and eventually it went into the sports area as well.  	It also, obviously, attracted a bigger staff, because we started the township edition, I think with two people; one white and I think the other one was black.  It attracted a greater staffing and a greater degree of freelancing.  	Now when we were faced with this criticism that the township edition was an apartheid edition, we said well, if it is regarded as an apartheid edition, surely the readers that we are attracting by that edition would have rejected in favour of the morning final edition. So what we did, is we used to print sufficient quantities of the morning final to enable us to put the one parcel of the township edition there and the next parcel next to it, the morning file edition at the bus stops in town, and people coming, black people coming off those buses would have the choice of whether they wanted the morning final edition or the black edition. And the answer was very clear, they wanted the black edition.  The reason why they wanted the black edition was because it had a lot of news of great interest to them.	But the other feature of the township edition, which was very important, is that it enabled one to cover a whole range of events, both political and semi-political and non-political in the townships and to cull those, for insertion into the main edition to the newspaper, which would normally, if there hadn't have been a township edition, have got that kind of story.  A number of those stories, quite a number of those stories went into the main edition.  So it informed the normal readership, the white readership of the Rand Daily Mail of what was going on in the townships.	Now that was a very important element of the township edition, although that wasn't its main reason.  There was criticism that we didn't transfer enough of those stories to the main edition.

MR LEWIN: Thank you.

CHAIRPERSON: Well, thank you, Mr Louw for having come, and I am quite aware of the fact that the time constraints are such that we are not able to put into what we are trying to achieve, as much as we would like to do. But I think you have endeavoured within those constraints, to give a perspective which is very, very important.  I think what has also assisted us, was that in your presentation you were able to incorporate your own responses to some of the things that were said by specifically Mr Horak and others.  So the days that you spent here, other than just coming for your own presentation, have been fruitful and it has also enriched us.  Thank you very much for having come.

RAYMOND LOUW: Thank you, Mr Chairman.

CHAIRPERSON: If we could have a copy of this presentation it would assist us. If we could have a copy of your presentation it would assist us.

RAYMOND LOUW: Yes, Mr Chairman.