Special Hearings — Media Hearings — 1997-09-15

MR LEWIN: Thank you very much for that.  I'd just like if I may to pick up on a couple of points, particularly going back to Goldhagen.  Could you take us through that again because there seems to me to be a slight, there's a gap in the stage of saying on the one hand this was a general overall ideology and on the other hand therefore saying people were responsible. Can you take us through that, into that step from saying there's an overall culture and then saying that the journalists were responsible.

UNKNOWN: Look it's - the Goldhagen book, the question that it asks is, I think, the one that has not been asked before and which I find an interesting one, a relevant one to the work of the TRC, he says we all know about the police battalions, we all know about the Gestapo and the Nazis in military warfare.  What was it that made ordinary people embrace anti-Semitism so uncritically?  What made ordinary people suddenly look around them and not see Jews as being human?   And he then looks quite carefully at role of the schools and the role of the media, role of the Sunday press, the popular Sunday press in the sort of stories that they ran in the sort of history that they served up, in the sort of popular consciousness that they managed to create. So that in the end there was a sort of hegedemony, there was simply just a way in which you didn't have to say to ordinary people turn in the Jewish kids in the neighbourhood that might still be hidden away, people would just do that on their own.  And it seems to me that in South Africa that in terms of the sort of responses that the TRC is asking for in terms of reconciliation, to ask housewives to think back at employing a gardener who didn't have a pass book and paying him minimal wages because he didn't have a passbook.  On that sort of level of simply just assuming that in your particular white environment the perspective that you'd adopted was that black people were not to be recognised, weren't there as human beings.  And where did this come from?  Apart as from history it was cultivated by, for instance on television one never saw images of black people in any executive position or any position except that of a menial.   When the famous Justice Tsungu did his Zulu classes, the first things that he taught were, please put in three gallons of petrol or boy fix up the lawnmower. That immediately you managed in popular consciousness through something like television, which really is very effective if you do it for a long enough time in cultivating a certain attitude.

MR LEWIN: So are you actually saying that there was a culpability here?

UNKNOWN: I would argue that when you do examine the dramas, when you do examine the news bulletins, where you look at the documentaries that it's such a seamless creation of a particular point of view that excluded blacks from society that there must be culpability, that the lack of argument and discussion on so-called discussion programmes, the lack of educational programmes, I think on that sort of level simply just to take something like the right to education, the way that SABC simply ignored that, the right to knowledge, the way that documentaries were, the documentary department and the education department were both cancelled at the same time because the news department had become a world of its own and it then started to do actuality programmes like we've just seen.  The whole border, an interesting point this, that the whole border between documentary and news was blurred into the thing called actuality where you could put across ideology and call it news.

MR LEWIN: Could I then ask the final question myself with a more difficult one.  As you know we have to make recommendations in the final report. Where would you suggest a public broadcaster such as the SABC, where would you suggest they go to overcome the difficulties that you have highlighted?

UNKNOWN: I think that the first thing that they should do is read the various protocols and declarations of the United Nations and UNESCO that exist, something like the 1978 UNESCO-Paris declaration which spells out quite clearly, quite simply what the obligations are on the media in terms of human rights, in terms of the right to information, the right to knowledge, the right to environment. etc.  It's there, we don't have to reinvent the wheel.  And I think that if we take human rights seriously and if we take the various protocols and declarations seriously on human rights in the media, the Brataslav Declaration, the Windhoek Declaration, and start to implement those seriously, we would be a long way down the road.

MR LEWIN: Thanks very much.   Mr Chairman, thank you.

<UNKNOWN>: Thank you Hugh.  Are there any questions?  Hlengiwe.

MS MKHIZE: Professor, can I just ask you about your project, the Media Monitoring Project.  How old is your project?

UNKNOWN: The Media Monitoring Project was started in 1991.  It is an NGO and it monitored at that time specifically news on SABC TV and it was monitoring the way in which information about the upcoming first democratic elections were being handled, was enough information being put across in the right way, the most appropriate way.    After that the media monitoring project monitored the local elections and it has now been working quite hard at monitoring the media in general from only monitoring the broadcast media, it now monitors the media in general.  Every Monday it sends out an update and it works on fairly large projects, research projects like looking at diversity in radio news, that's the big project that's been funded, and also looking at gender disparities, images of violence, that's the general sort of thrust, trying to properly at the way the link human rights, gender issues, violence issues with the depiction of those in the media.

MS MKHIZE: My related concern or question is that, based on what we have heard since this morning, it's like racism played a major role in the perpetration of human rights violations especially against black people. The question which I would like to put to you is, within your project, where do you think we are today?   What role do you think the media is playing today?  Is it successful in assisting the people of this country to begin to see each other differently as against the socially constructed identities of black and white people?   Where do you think we are and where do you think we are going?  I'm asking that hoping that you'll look particularly at the role that the media is playing.