Special Hearings — Media Hearings — 1997-09-15

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very, very much Mr Reddy and in your acting capacity as Group Head, wonderful,
thank you very much, we are most deeply grateful.  May I just say before we begin that we in the TRC 
deplore the defacing of the Biko statue as a body-blow to the process of reconciliation in our land.  We must not,
however, jump to the conclusion that the AWB is necessarily responsible, it could very well  be the action of 
some disgruntled individual.  I hope the AWB will, if that is the case, repudiate this outrageous  act and distance
 themselves from it.   Having just returned I also just wish to say a very big thank you to all of those of you
and others who have sent greetings and good wishes and prayers for my recovery.  My family and I value it all
enormously.  Thank you very much for letting us have the use of this venue and we are, I think, agreed that 
there is a certain appropriateness in it happening here.  I won't tell you what my colleague on my right said we 
could actually say we were doing being in here since I am slightly more diplomatic in the things that I do say.   
We also would like to say thank you to the staff of Hanley Studios who have helped to put this together.   I want to 
say a big thank you to the special working group of the TRC who have been responsible for arranging this 
Media hearing.  Denzil Potgieter here who has abandoned us in the Human Rights Violations Committee, 
having  been appointed to the Amnesty Committee has been chairing this working group; John Allen our 
media director; Wynand Malan, a commissioner, and Hugh Lewin who has worked very, very hard indeed to 
put this together.  But we also want to say thank you to Laura Pollecutt who has been the researcher and 
assistant and really it is she who should be commended very, very warmly which we do.    In referring to
my colleagues in the TRC I just want to say that I have been filled with very considerable chagrin when I was 
away that they didn't miss me, they were doing such a superb job of work I thought that they were going to be 
sending SOS's to New York and say come back but I mean these two, Alex Boraine and Dumisa Ntsebeza 
have been quite splendid in the work that they have done and I want to pay a very warm tribute to all of my 
colleagues at the TRC, the commissioners, committee members and the staff, you are all really the cat's 
whiskers and I am glad I am back just to make sure that you continue your good work.  We would also 
want to say a big thank you to those who have sent submissions. We have had a fair number of these and unfortunately only a small selection of these can be heard, but we
want to assure everyone who sent submissions that those submissions are going to form, are forming part 
of the TRC record.
There will be three main themes in this hearing - today will be devoted to the Broadcast Media, with a special
look at the SABC plus two window cases of BOP and Radio Freedom.  And then tomorrow we will concentrate 
on the Media and the State, the crucial question of the relationship between Media and the State which we will
 explore through the individual testimony of journalists and  the testimony of several State operatives whose 
activities have been up to now largely clandestine.  Could I just introduce again, this is Hugh Lewin who is 
a committee member of the Human Rights Violations Committee and based in our Gauteng region.  I have already
 said Denzil Potgieter, a commissioner from our Western Cape region, now on the Amnesty Committee.  
Hlengiwe Mkhize on the extreme right who is chairperson of the, she is a commissioner and chairperson of the
 Reparations and Rehabilitation Committee.  Dumisa Ntsebeza next to her who is head of our Investigative Unit 
and has been in my absence acting deputy-chairperson.  Alex Boraine, who has been acting chairperson of the 
Commission and who is the Commission's deputy-chair.  He and Dumisa are based in the Western Cape and 
Hlengiwe is based here in Johannesburg.  Sort of really apropos of absolutely nothing I was travelling from 
here to go to Atlanta and I, last year for the Olympic Games, and I was sitting next to a co-pilot who was going to
 be flying the plane back to South Africa and he told a delightful story that when SAA introduced Black stewardesses
 the one stewardess came into first class and they were serving dinner and one of the passengers said, could I 
please have black pepper and the stewardess disappeared and returned with a copy of the Sowetan.  (General 
laughter).  I think that's a nice story.  We have a broad, indeed very wide mandate which is to try to give as 
complete a picture as possible of the human rights violations, gross human rights violations that have taken 
place during the period we have been asked to study, 1960 to 1994, seeking to establish the perspectives, etc, 
of the different protagonists in the conflict of the past.  And we are also meant to give recommendations about 
the kind of structures, organisations, etc that ought to be put in place to ensure that the gross violations of human 
rights do not recur.  Without question the cruciality of the media, it's freedom and accountability as a key structure,
 totally indispensable to a free society will feature strongly in the recommendations the TRC will make.  It is virtually 
an article of faith that a free society can flourish only, inter alia, if it has a free, courageous, vibrant and responsible 
press, because without such a free press, free media, democracy and freedom are ultimately impossible.
I doubt that any of the media could be accused of directly grossly violating human rights, but quite a few would 
not be able to plead not guilty to helping foster the sort of climate in which such violations were possible.  To have
 been indifferent to the abrogation of the rule of law, not to care much about detention without trial or about the fate
 of detainees, encouraged those at whose mercy they were, to claim that they injured themselves hitting their heads
 against walls, and because they had exercised their right to starve, to starve to a death that would leave a cabinet 
minister cold, would the media who did this be accessories of some sort?  How do you stretch the whole notion 
of culpability?  
We are obviously distressed at the attitude of the Afrikaans media with regard to this particular hearing.  It will 
lose its case by default. It will hamper our work since an important voice will be missed.  We are not partisan. 
We want to draw, as I have indicated as complete a picture, and for that to be possible we need the input of all
 the different constituencies.  Is silence from that quarter to be construed as consent conceding that it was a 
sycophantic handmade of the apartheid government?  We won't know unless they speak up to put their side 
of the story, and we still hope that they might take the opportunity of somehow letting us know their side.  They 
should certainly not blame the TRC if we reflect only those points of view which were canvassed before us.  
I have told the story before but it is one that probably bears a repetition about the drunk who accosted a 
pedestrian and asked, "I shay which is the other shide of the street?", and the pedestrian somewhat non-plussed 
said "that side of course", and the drunk said "shtrange, when I was that shide they said it this shide".  The other 
side of the street depends obviously on where you are.  The other side of the street determines your perspective, 
what you see is not some brute fact that stands in its own right over there.  And speaking from my perspective as 
one who was disenfranchised, a disenfranchised non-this, non-that, for me a rough and ready distinction and I 
think this was true of most of us coming from that community, was to be drawn between those who supported and
 those who were against apartheid.  The former, mostly but not exclusively, Afrikaans and the electronic media, 
as Mr Reddy has already said, and the latter, those against, almost exclusively English with some African 
languages, the former largely mouthpieces of the ruling elite, hardly ever the watchdogs one had hoped for the 
public, and the latter generally opposed but from the perspective of whites, and you knew this.  We used to say 
that you could have almost a kind of euclidian theorem, anything that pleased most whites in this country you could
 guarantee was sure to displease most blacks.    And so in things like the sports boycott almost all the major
 media would be opposed.  Sanctions, or in terminology almost all spoke of the "terrorist" when they could in fact
 have used slightly more neutral nomenclature, the "guerilla or insurgent".  And almost all gleefully reporting what
 would embarrass especially black activists.  The black press, in our view, seem to show its mettle by the fact of it
 being so thoroughly harassed by the so-called system.  So far as I am aware only major black papers were banned.
And yet you can't quite generalise about the media.  They are like the curate's egg, good in parts, for it was
 the media that did in fact expose the info scandal.  There the media that printed the interview with Tambo.  And I
 had the strange distinction of having a major newspaper use the letter that I had written to that newspaper as a front
 page editorial.  They have confessed to discriminating against black journalists and of employing intelligence spies.
I want to finish by just saying to you the purpose of what we are about is not to pillory or ridicule anyone, even to 
put them on the spot, it is ultimately to try to get at the truth about what actually happened, what aided and abetted 
the apartheid system and what to do for the future; that we want to encourage vigorous debate allowing for different 
points of view, and as we know the role of the media is under critical scrutiny throughout the world in the wake of 
Princess Di's and Dodi's fatal crash and the alleged part played in all of this by the paparazzi, and we want to ask 
does the media merely pander to public appetite for sensation and sleaze etc, or does it help to create public opinion?
Does it have a didactic role or merely there to inform, and if so, how?  Is it to tell this public only what it wants to hear, 
to reflect its standards, its tastes, its mores or has it a higher vocation to help cultivate the sort of milieu where it
 would be normal to ask the awkward question, but why?  To prick the bubble of bombast of the self-important; of 
having an erring instinct for sniffing out humbug, corruption and inefficiency and alerting those in public office that 
they would be held to the highest standards of honesty, integrity, accountability and conscientiousness and, that these 
media were anything but sycophantic lick-spittles.    We are deeply grateful to be helped in this mission, first by 
the submissions to which we have referred which come from a wide cross-section of public, individual and journalist 
and media organisations, and also through the considerable public debate sparked by the announcement that we were 
considering this hearing.  Whatever the dust that has been raised this is as it should be, rather than as of old sweeping 
everything under the carpet.  So I hand over to you Denzil.