Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

NEIL JACOBSON: Instead you can have the boredom of my monotone, Mr Chairman.  Thank you.  Another issue that has been raised and discussed today has been the role played by the NPU, the Newspaper Press Union.  Now, we have some practical difficulty, again there, in that none of us present, including the editors present, were members of the committees or the NPU at that particular time, particularly regarding the Police and Defence Liaison Committees, but, certainly, the submission argues and the information we have been able to gather, indicates that these committees were an attempt to, at least, get some information out of a State clampdown.  They were driven, I believe, by the principle that some information is better than none.	Now, the editors themselves, Mr Chairman, participated in this process and Mr Gibson, one of those editors, describes those committees as being more sensible than sinister.  From the companies viewpoint we repeat that at no stage were the editors instructed to tone down their copy.  Was the NPU's contact with Government a mistake?  It is impossible to judge without full access to the facts.  It certainly looks difficult from this particular perspective, but either way, I think we believe it was a genuine attempt to elicit information which was otherwise not available.	The point, I think, we must never forget, Mr Chairman, is that the channels of communication had been closed down by the Government and the key lesson that we should all learn from this is that no Government must ever allow, to be able to do that again.  Let us never forget that everything that we are talking about today was effectively a response to the actions of Government and to restrictive laws and that the press was, therefore, as much a victim of the process as everyone else.	I would like to talk briefly, although we do cover it in some depth in the written submission, about discrimination in the news rooms.  We have heard some moving stories this morning which have humbled all of us, I think.  I have no reason, whatsoever, to doubt the allegations that have been made about discrimination within the news rooms.  I am sure there was discrimination in those news rooms as a result of the Law of the time or because of personal prejudice or insensitivity or human weakness and I want to say, Mr Chairman, that Times Media Limited sincerely regrets any such indignities that were imposed upon people in our news rooms, but was there a policy of discrimination?  I do not believe so.	To quote Mr Gibson from this, our submission again,		"Newspapers are produced under conditions of stress.  Sensibilities get trampled on creating perceptions of racism even when none is intended",and in the final analysis, Mr Chairman, was SAAN's role, SAAN's TML role may have been imperfect.  It is also true to say that our leaders, our newspapers were leaders in providing opportunities for black journalists that simply did not exist anywhere else.  	We have also heard and, particularly, yesterday a great deal about spies in the news room.  Tails that certainly have horrified all of us and turned our stomachs, I think.  Again, I would like to make the point that the newspapers were victims in this process.  The fact that the State saw fit to plant spies in our news room, I would suggest, decries any suggestion that we were willing lapdogs of the State.  It seems to me to make a mockery of any suggestion that we colluded with the State.  I am told that there were plenty of rumours of spies.  I am told that people pointed to each other.  We have heard about the whispering campaigns today.  The fact of the matter is that the policy of our newspapers was to subscribe to the principle of innocent until proven guilty.  	It has only been very recently that the facts, the proof have come out as far as spies were concerned.  Those spies were never planted by the newspapers, they were planted by Government and, therefore, as I say, the newspapers themselves, were as much victims of this process, but let us look forward, Mr Chairman, and let us deal with some of the questions that have been raised by the Commission.	What can be learnt from the past so as not to repeat these errors as we go forward into the future?  We need to ensure, Mr Chairman, that never again is a Government allowed to apply the sort of policies and rules that inhibited the freedom of the press.  We need to accept, I believe, that there will always be tensions between Government and the press, because good Government demands a vigorously critical press, to be the public watchdog and to be a break on power.  The press equally, Mr Chairman, must equally accept and recognise its responsibility to be fair, to be balanced and to be accurate, but, most of all, we must recognise and enshrine the fact, enshrine the fact that the free press is the very foundation of a democracy.		Let me turn briefly, in conclusion, to the questions in the documentations sent to us by the Commission requesting our presence here today.  Some specific questions were raised.  I would like to touch on those very briefly and give you our answers to those.  	The first question was how TML had responded to the legal framework and the extent to which it attested the limitations during the period under review.  I think we have touched on that fairly extensively already and, certainly, in the written submission we go into some detail on it.  By and large, as Mr Clark stated, we acted within the Law, seeking not to give a hostile Government the reason it was looking for to close us.  We believed we could do more good by staying open than by being silenced.  Nevertheless, it was not easy.  We had lawyers at our side all of the time, at huge expense, to test the Law at every single step.  I refer again to Mr Hoff's letter in which he states, unequivocally, that his brief was to find ways to publish material, not to suppress it. 	I think also, Mr Chairman, that proof of the fact that we pushed the limitation lies in the fact that many of our editors and journalists, and we have heard some of them who worked for TML Publications today, many of them were persecuted because of what they wrote.  If we were not pushing the Laws, how could they have been persecuted.  Thus, I state, as I have already twice, that we, too, were victims of apartheid in this sense.  	We were asked to speak on the companies attitude to black workers and I have already admitted that discrimination existed at times, that I have no doubt, and I have already apologised very sincerely for that discrimination that existed in the past, but I do not believe there was a policy by the company to discriminate.  I would like to quote something that Mr Neville Woodburg, who has been the editor of The Evening Post for many years, wrote to us when we asked our editors to give us some response on this.  He says that,		"In the Editorial Department we did not ...",this is of The Evening Post,		"... we did not treat our black staff any differently from anyone else.  While the Law stated that separate toilets should be used by the different races, all of our staff used the same toilets, certainly during the time I had been with The Evening Post from 1970 to the present.  		In other parts of the building there were separate toilets, but then under pressure from The Herald editor, Harry O'Connor and myself, these were scrapped in the early 1980's in defiance of the Law."Certainly, the newspaper I worked on in that period, Pretoria News, which was part owned by TML, there were no separate toilets and there was one canteen for all staff, but I do not doubt what we have heard earlier on today.  It is, thankfully, in the past.	On the positive side, Mr Chairman, we hired and trained, imperfectly, both white and black journalists.  Myself included use to complain about the poor standards of training of journalism,  but we hired and trained more black journalists than any other publisher in South Africa.  SAAN TML by no means was perfect, but we opened the door sooner and we opened the door wider than anyone else in this profession in this country.	We were asked about the companies relationship with Government and, I hope it has been, it has become quite clear from our submission, that our relationship was antagonistic and confrontational with Government.  We make lengthy reference on pages seven, eight and nine of our submission to a long list of assaults on our newspapers by Government which indicate the level or persecution and harassment that our journalists endured.  	We were asked to address the question of the companies role within the NPU.  The NPU was established as far back as 1882 as a body to deal with, primarily, commercial issues, standards of printing, news print supplies, market research, circulation figures and so forth, and when Government started interfering with the free flow of information in this country, the NPU seemed to be the natural body from which this problem was tackled.  Now, I speak for TML, not for the NPU, but it does seem to me that whatever mistakes were made, the primary drive was an attempt to, at least, get some information out of a Government unwilling to communicate.	As it happens, Mr Chairman, the NPU, just these past two days, has held its annual congress and the members of the NPU, being primarily the major newspaper groups, have decided that it is time, in view of the changed circumstances in South Africa, that the role of the NPU needs to be reviewed, that the role of the NPU needs to be redefined, that we must redefine the purpose and the mission of this body to seek, to make it representative of all newspaper interests in South Africa.  	Finally, Mr Chairman, we were asked how our newspapers had approached the question of violence in KwaZulu Natal and elsewhere.  I am, quite simply, not in a position to answer that question, because, as we have stated, it is never and has never been an editorial policy handed down from management to editors as to how they should handle a particular story.  Should the Commission so wish, we have several of our editors present who, I am sure, would be more than qualified to answer that question, but there has never been a policy from us saying you must handle this story or any other story in a particular way.  So, I am simply unqualified to be able to answer that particular question.  The editors are very willing to give a statement should the Commission so require.  Thank you, Mr Chairman, that is all I have to say.