Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

IVAN FALLON: If I could just, I mean, as I understood it, as I understood this report, there was a great debate between the so-called liberals and the liberationists and most of our editors prided themselves on being liberals and there is a liberal tradition of journalists, journalism in South Africa which is slightly different.  It took me a long time to pick that up too, it took, it has a slightly different meaning to how I would use the liberal in the UK.  I spent most of my career, but it is this debate between that the liberals felt that they had to give as objective, fair journalists, they had to give both sides of the argument whereas the liberationists felt that the newspaper should have actually committed themselves very positively and one-sidedly, if necessary, to a cause which they felt was totally one-sided and by giving the other view, ie, the State view, you are actually unbalancing the story rather than balancing it.

MR LEWIN: If that, thank you for that explanation.  I mean, does that then go on.  If I could give one example that also came up yesterday in the testimony of Craig Kotze.  We, in fact, went through about 100 of his stories over a period in the 80's and early 90's under his byline as crime reporter.  Every, I mean the pattern that came through from them was completely no balance, completely the mouthpiece of either the Minister of Police or the police themselves or his own antagonism to the general mass democratic movement.  	What interests us is to know how was it possible for him through a large number of years, actually, to write those sort of stories if the management and the editorial management was not, in fact, in sympathy with his lines.

IVAN FALLON: Moegsien.

MOEGSIEN WILLIAMS: Maybe just to respond, first, to your initial question and on my personal experience, I joined the Cape Argus in the middle of the 70's and I could very clearly identify with what Jon Qwelane and Thami Mazwai, for instance, were saying about that period and, in fact, to also what Don Mattera was saying, because we arrived on newspapers with a lot of anger in our heart about the situation.  As far as Cape Town is concerned, on the Cape Flats, the oppression and the iniquities of apartheid and, in a way, when I joined The Cape Argus, that was one of the reasons why I joined the paper, was to write about these, the evil of apartheid.	We came into a newsroom where, obviously, with, where we found a cleavage, a dichotomy as far as our white colleagues were concerned.  In fact, we operated in the same newsroom from two different worlds and, I think, this is what Patton was also trying to say, trying to distinguish between the kind of anger and our reportage of what we saw on the Cape Flats and, I think, Jon Qwelane spoke out quite eloquently about it.  The kind of dilemmas that we found ourselves in as journalists, black journalists, having to go back to a community where we just received some information and, you know, having to justify what appeared in the newspaper and we have to explain, you know, that these sub-editors are all white and they do not understand and they, make excuses on behalf of the newspaper.  That was the particular problem that, I think, as black journalists we had.  	Coming to the whole question of people like Craig Kotze, I suppose we will never know the real truth, whether editors or management knew about the activities of people like Craig Kotze.  I, the kind of editors I have worked with, I doubt that very sincerely, but ... (intervention).

MR LEWIN: But they saw the stories every day?

MOEGSIEN WILLIAMS: Oh, yes, there was an ... (intervention).

MR LEWIN: And they printed them.

MOEGSIEN WILLIAMS: But I, in my experience in The Cape Argus news room, with people who I also suspected of being spies and plants of the security establishment, they were always accommodated, in a way.  We got the facts on the Cape Flats, in Guguletu and Khayelitsha and Mitchell's Plain and they got the police comment.  They were accommodated because they had this greater access to the security establishment.  Information, in fact, I think it was a practice on some of our newspapers, never to appoint a journalist with an English sounding surname, because it, as a crime reporter or as a Defence Force correspondent, because it may not go down well with the Afrikaner establishment, within the security establishment.	So, if you look through the bylines on these, in the newspapers over these years, you will always find Defence Force correspondents, crime correspondence with an Afrikaans sounding surname.  In a way they were accommodated, because they were of some value in serving the needs of the newspaper and maybe that gave people, like Craig Kotze, the impression that they were accepted also.

MR LEWIN: Thank you.  Do you think this might have had something to do with another point which Don Mattera actually raised this morning, but which has come up before and that is the influx of the Rhodesians, because at the time of independence in Zimbabwe, 79, 80, there was a large number of journalists who gapped it from Harare, took the gap to Joburg and Cape Town.  The reason they did so was for very, very strong political reasons and, certainly, sitting in Zimbabwe reading the reports emanating from South Africa, one could see a particular vent in their stories.  Particularly, how they reported both on South Africa, but also on events outside and across the border.  Do you think that that might have had an effect?

MOEGSIEN WILLIAMS: Yes, I have no doubt that, and I need to preface my response by saying that I have, some Rhodesians who emigrated to South Africa and I have worked with quite, very serious professionals, but without a shadow of a doubt, they came with a conservative approach to, they saw the liberation of Zimbabwe as an evil thing.  It, in fact, it displaced them, they are now without a job and I would, could understand, maybe, to a certain extent, why they would be anti the liberation struggle in South Africa.  This clearly, when I joined The Argus subs room, at the time there was huge influx of former Rhodesians into The Argus subs room and it reflected in the news columns of the paper.  I think Don Mattera is quite correct.

MR LEWIN: Thank you.  If I could just return to another, yes, just my last question, Mr Chairman, another rather peculiar quote here.  We, I, you did talk about the fast track programme last year.  I just ask if there were any black women on that programme and then point to page eight where there is a quote from your submission saying,		"Why were there no women editors?  The simple reason was society dictated it.  There were no all-round women journalists.  It was not that the newspapers kept them out, there were not any trained in society."I see we do have some all-round women journalists in the audience, but I just wondered whether you could comment on this and how one gets over that very blatant gap.