Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

JOLYON NUTTALL: Thank you very much.  I apologise for not having made the submission available to you before now.  it was, however, completed last evening and I was not able to get it to you before that. 	May I please as a preamble make it absolutely clear that what I am going to say and what I have submitted to you is in my personal capacity at the request of a spokesperson for the hearing.  In no way does it represent a formal submission by or on behalf of the Newspaper Press Union of South Africa, and many of the views and comments expressed in the document may well differ from the NPU's official stance on the subjects concerned, and may also be at variance with those of individual newspaper proprietors and their senior executives who held office during the period under review.	I was president of the NPU from September 1988 to September 1990 and a member of the executive council for a number of years before that.  I retired from what was then Argus Newspapers, now Independent Newspapers in April 1991 and I have lived in Cape Town since then.  I have kept no files to assist me in the preparation of this document and I have had to rely, therefore, on memory and also on such documentation as the current secretariat of the Print Media Association under which the NPU now falls which they faxed to me at short notice, and then one or two other sources.	Just for the record I haven't had any formal access to documentation involving the Truth Commission's hearing into the role of the media and nor have I seen the submission which was made by Independent Newspapers which I understand you will be considering tomorrow.  So all I know of the hearing and the submission that they will be making is what I have read in the media, it's from what I have read in the media.	The period under review I gathered from talking to Hugh Lewin last week is from 1960 to 1994 and what I am going to try and do is sketch very briefly the way in which I became involved in this organisation called the NPU because I think it typifies what happened in many other cases.	In 1960 which was the period under which the start of your review I was a journalist working in New York covering the United Nations.  I spent most of my working hours there.  I was a practising journalist in fact for nine years from 1955 to 1963 before moving to the management ranks of the Argus Company where I was a junior assistant to begin with, before working my way up through the ranks to become from 1981 to 1991 manager of The Star newspaper and for a period the Sowetan as well.	Now as a member of management I was expected by my superiors to play a part in industry matters.  I was a member of the management council of the Audit Bureau of Circulations, became chairman in the mid-eighties.  I served on the management committee of the South African Press Association, became vice-chairman in the late eighties.  I became a member of the executive council of the NPU in the mid-seventies as far as I can recall and as a junior served on various of the smaller sub-committees. 	In the latter part of the eighties I also served on the NPU Defence Department Liaison Committee and the NPU SAP Police Liaison Committee, and I will be returning to comment on that experience in my presentation shortly.Those committees, as far as I can ascertain, were established in the sixties when I was still a journalist.  	Members of the NPU executive council came from a wide range of what is often referred to today as the mainstream newspapers.  There was a provincial press division and there was a magazine division as well as a main section for urban dailies and weeklies.  	And I am tabling with my document a copy of the NPU constitution for your records from which it can be seen what a wide range of objectives the organisation had in attempting to promote the interests of the newspaper industry.  It was a sort of newspapering chamber of commerce.  	I think to illustrate this more clearly I shall also be tabling the minutes of a typical meeting of the NPU executive council when I was president.  There were 23 members of that council and no fewer than 25 items or sub-items are recorded in the minutes.  They range from the need to negotiate a new newsprint contract with the Mills; a letter from the Competition Board; the cartage of newsprint from Durban to Cape Town; proposal to move the SA Media Council which succeeded the SA Press Council from Cape Town to Johannesburg; to dealings with the Advertising Research Foundation and the General Industry Fund; to a letter from myself to the Minister of Law and Order recording my concern about the recent harassment of an editor of an NPU member newspaper; to forthcoming meetings of the NPU SAP and NPU SADF Liaison Committees; the activities of the marketing committee; advertising agency matters; stock exchange prices; correspondence with the prison service and a programme of further meetings.	The four main newspaper groups which were members of the NPU were Argus Newspapers, which is now called Independent Newspapers; South African Associated Newspapers, now called Times Media Ltd; Nasionale Pers and Perskor.  The newspapers produced by Nasionale Pers and Perskor supported the Nationalist Government and its apartheid policy.  	In the hard years of apartheid when the Argus and SAAN opposed the government the Engelse Pers was seen as much of a danger and a threat to the State as the swart gevaar. Politically executive council members made very uneasy bedfellows and tensions arose periodically because of this. Overall, however, the council members stood firm together and there have been examples quoted in some of the books and documents that have been written about the era when there were threats to the independence of their newspapers.  	In particular, and I would like to highlight an example, involved the president at the time of the NPU, Mr Helm Muller, an immediate past president, Mr Long David de Villiers an advocate who was then chair or managing director of Nasionale Pers.  I was a new boy on the council, it was in 1976 and the Prime Minister, BJ Vorster and his Cabinet were planning to establish a press court which would define and punish the publication of what they called "ascertainable factual lies".	They were far from satisfied with the performance of the Press Reference Board which had been set up six years before by the NPU, and - no in 1962 in fact by the NPU and which had received only 15 complaints in its first six years.  There were also calls for a register of journalists to be established.  And I am indebted to a book called "Editors under Fire" by Harvey Tyson, former editor of The Star for refreshing my memory on some of this information.	The Council was in session in Cape Town at the time and it sent a small delegation led by the NPU President, Mr Helm Muller to meet with Vorster and members of the Cabinet.  In what was apparently a very robust confrontation Muller argued against State intervention and in fact won the day.  Although he agreed to drop pending legislation the Prime Minister told the delegation 'get your house in order or I'll do it for you'.  	When Muller, and accompanied by de Villiers, Long David de Villiers came back to the Council meeting they were given a rousing reception by their fellow members, but the price was a new Press Council.  And it was formed by the newspapers with the powers to impose fines of up to R10 000.  I remember at the time that was considered - R10 000 had teeth.  Tyson notes in his book, however, that in the event fines were very rare and never exceeded a nominal R250.	But that encounter between Prime Minister and NPU president brought home to me the very real threat that we face not only to press freedom but to possible closure of some newspapers, and that was in a sense my baptism of fire in the world of the NPU and its encounters with the State.	In the light of recent comments about the Press Council by the retired editor of the Sunday Times, Ken Owen, in an article in the Mail and Guardian, it's interesting to note the view of Harvey Tyson who was editor of The Star for 16 years up until 1990.  The Press Council, and I quote...		"...operated without confirming the foreboding of those who thought the press had sold its soul. The worst that can be said of the Press Council was that it irritated editors beyond measure with its arbitrary decisions, though we did not hesitate to criticise its judgements just as much as it might criticise our headlines".	By the time I came to occupy the chair at the NPU the Press Council had been superseded by the SA Media Council. This process began in about 1980-81 when a conference of editors appointed a committee of five of their members, Messrs Ton Vosloo, Harold Pakendorff, Tyson, Tertius Myburgh and Ed Linnington, editor of SAPO who was the convenor, to draw up the proposals for a replacement.	This step was taken, Mr Linnington tells me, because editors were unhappy with the Press Council, they perceived its decisions to be against them always and the procedures to be slow and formal.  The Committee produced a plan taking elements from the British and the European Press Council and then incorporated the introduction of a mediator or conciliator who would try to settle complaints before they went to adjudication. The NPU agreed to fund the Media Council and was still doing so when I was president.  	It was called the Media Council because it aspired to include the broadcast media.  In '91 the broadcast element was dropped and the body reverted to being called the Press Council of South Africa which it is today, which it was until this year, when in fact it was abolished and the simple system of an ombudsman and an appeal panel was introduced.	Mr Chairman there were 18 presidents of the NPU during the all period of review.  Each served a two year term of office and they were drawn by and large in rotation from the main member groups and the handful of independent newspapers such as the Natal Witness.  I have listed the names of those presidents in the master document.   I don't propose to go through them now.	Many of these men held office or were senior members of the executive council during the setting-up of the Press Council and the defence agreement and the police agreement.  Several of them are alive and kicking today and I am surprised they have not been approached for their recollections of the circumstances which prevailed at the time.  I am also surprised that the NPU itself has not made a submission.  I understand that two of the major players were against it.	In my experience being president of the NPU was 10% honour and 90% chore.  It was an office you were expected to fill when your turn in the pecking order came around.  You were not relieved of any of your duties with the company that employed you, in my case Argus, you just ran faster and harder during the two years.  As I have shown many issues found their way onto the agenda of the executive council and there were many functions and positions which you filled ex officio during your time in the chair.	Among the ex officio posts one had to fill was co-chair of the NPU Defence and Police Liaison committees. These committees monitored the implementation of the two agreements.  There are photostat copies here of what the actual agreements were, you may have those already I am not sure.  They considered matters of policy and principle including possible amendments.  Meetings were also used as opportunities by Defence and Police officials to brief editors and managers on the state of the nation from their perspective.  Editors and managers served on the committees in equal proportion, three a side if I remember correctly, three editors and three managers.	Most of us in my time were alert to attempts to whitewash the situation particularly in the Angola era when we knew South African soldiers were being killed but we could not publish the fact.  We were also alert to attempts to brainwash us.  I personally found it a distasteful task to co-chair these meetings.  It was not my practice to hobnob with the military and with policemen.  However, I believed it was sufficiently important to maintain the agreements in order to secure information for our readers that we would not obtain otherwise and that which the law itself, in certain circumstances, would not allow.  	The Defence Act for instance, and I am again indebted to Tyson's book for the details, actually banned anyone from publishing almost any unauthorised information about the composition, movements or dispositions of troops and anything else to do with the military. Tyson notes the Act was so wide that the Defence Force was tempted into insisting that newspapers could not, without military permission, even publish details of a motor accident involving military personnel.	When the army began to be used for internal operations against South Africans, coupled with PW Botha's concept of total onslaught relationships between the Defence Force and the media became, at best, frigid, and at worst, hostile, and the meetings of the Liaison Committee were tense affairs.  	On the face of it the agreement with the SAP opened the way to a greater flow of news through the issue of accredited press cards.  Clause 7.3 took note that, quote -		"The SAP realised that the press has an obligation to inform the public fully, accurately and as rapidly as possible about newsworthy events".		Clause 7.4 -		"The SAP undertakes to make fully available to NPU members, through the holders of press cards, such newsworthy information as may be in its possession and which it can release without obstructing the administration of justice or at hampering investigations".	By the time I was co-chair of the Committee from September '88 to September '90 the increasingly brutal and sinister role of the security police, which was then emerging, overtook the focus of more standard SAP matters.  As details of these activities became known attempts by the commissioner and his top echelons to put on a friendly face to media representatives, increased.  	I recall one dreadful occasion when the Minister of Law and Order, Adriaan Vlok hosted a lunch at Parliament for the Committee members after a scheduled meeting of the NPU Police Liaison Committee and presented NPU representatives, the editors included, with a set of SAP cufflinks each.  I was sitting next to Joe Lategomo, who was editor of the Sowetan at the time and we debated with each other how best to dispose of these objects and a few days later I threw my set down a stormwater drain.  There is no doubt in my mind now that we should have declined any form of social function associated with these Liaison Committee meetings. 	The NPU had many shortcomings in my view.  It had a reputation among advertising people for high-handedness. This was largely because it tried to prevent deals off the card, as it were, with individual members.  It did not speak out loudly enough against the injustices of apartheid but this was largely because half its members were supporters of the Nationalist Government.  	It failed to encourage media diversity, and in particular print diversity, when apart from anything else it would have been good business practice to do so.  Of course the government made it almost impossible for small independent publications to start up by requiring through the Newspaper and Imprint Act, or the Newspaper Registration Act, I am not sure which, a deposit of R50 000 before they could do so and this was clearly beyond the means of most of those small publications.  Nevertheless existing papers already registered could have done more than they did through training and product development to encourage new voices and the NPU should have given the lead.	In the time that I have been away from mainstream newspapers I have served on the Independent Media Diversity Trust and have also through another development world in which I was involved secured funding for small newspapers and helped to establish a development news agency, and it's come home to me how many small voices there were and are out in the community that in fact require support and training and guidance, that a body like the NPU, in fact, should have addressed.	Essentially its members were people who focused on the survival and wellbeing of their own newspapers and the opportunities and threats which faced them.  	In this context, and in conclusion I would like to draw the hearings attention to an article which appeared in the Cape Times just the other day, August 26 1997, by Dr Anthony Holliday.  He's a former political journalist who worked on newspapers for a number of years under review and who teaches philosophy at the University of the Western Cape, School of Government.  He writes, quote -		"The offices of such newspapers as the Rand Daily Mail, The Star, The Argus, Sunday Times were not by and large filled with prophets or historians or moral zealots, but with journalists who thought they were only as good as that day's story and managers for whom the weekly circulation figures and advertising ratings were most of what counted.  But in their pursuit of these objectives they were so hemmed in and hampered by a plethora of restrictive laws and the blind hatred of officers of the apartheid State machine that often just doing one's job decently could pass for a high order of courage".	Thank you.