Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

SAM SOUL: I will just introduce us.  I am Sam Soul, I am the current president of the South African Union of Journalists which was formally the SASJ referred to in previous submissions.  Pat Sidley is a past president, was president during some of the most crucial periods of the Union.  We have made a submission to the TRC.  I will read some summary points from that submission and perhaps deal with one or two issues arising out of that, Pat will do the same and then perhaps we can take questions, if that's alright.	The Union believes that there were serious shortcomings within the mainstream English press with regard to the coverage of apartheid and the forces opposing it.  It further believes that the TRC process offers an opportunity for critical self-evaluation within the press and the media generally.  	It believes further that many of the shortcomings that we note in our submission were the result, not so much of personal culpability but of institutional weaknesses and need to be addressed on those terms.  	Fourthly we note that many individual journalists toiled variously against a repressive state, a hostile company culture and a conservative editorial management, often all three at once in pursuit of high journalistic ideals.  	Fifthly, that media institutions currently, and in the past, are weakened by their fragmentation especially along racial lines.	Sixthly, that the commercial nature of the mainstream English media, coupled with the repressive legal and political framework of the time did lead to editorial compromise.	Seven, that the Union kept alive the concept of editorial independence and that the mainstream English media kept intact the structure of an independent media, an independent press.	Finally that the TRC should investigate the State subversion of the media, especially the SABC, but also in the form of placing of spies and informers with the aim, specifically, of signposting and preventing such subversion in future.	I'd like to deal a little bit with the history of the SAUJ.  As was pointed out it has a history of white organisation originally.  It was formed in 1920 when the whole industry was dominated by whites and Europeans and white and European culture.  	In the fifties there was new legislation enacted when the Union first began to try to deal with the issue of race.  In 1958 the National Party introduced the Industrial Conciliation Act which was tabled, ironically enough, by F W de Klerk's father, Senator J de Klerk.  And the Acts precluded the existence of completely mixed trade unions.  The SASJ, as it was then, had a number of non-white to use the terms of those days, non-white people who wished to join the Union and were waiting to see what was going to be the outcome of the Act.  The SASJ wrote to the Minister asking for an exemption and it was refused and the request was dismissed as an audacity.	The Act meant that if the Union wanted to open up it would have to de-register and lose the protection offered by the law to unions at that stage.  Members voted in 1960 in response to that situation for a partially mixed option which allowed for coloured and indian members in separate branches from their white counterparts.  These members were not allowed to stand for the executive positions of the society and African journalists were in terms of the legislation completely excluded.  	So it was when the UBJ was formed, as far as I can tell going back into the history of the Union, was because in terms of the legislation then black and African journalists, specifically, were not legally entitled to be members of the SASJ.	That situation began to change in the '70's when people like Clive Emden began to campaign for the de-racialisation of the Union, and that entailed de-registering the Union and losing the protection that labour legislation offered then.  It also entailed achieving a two-thirds majority decision to actually dissolve the SASJ, from our members and it took a long time.  The decision to do so was only taken in 1977, and I think perhaps by that stage it was a bit too little, too late.  We'd already had the uprisings of 1976 and the polarisation and particularly racial polarisation which followed on that.  	There were some attempts thereafter to join with the UBJ but the kind of - the strength of feelings at that stage, I think particularly from the UBJ's side precluded any real coming together, and I think they felt possibly justifiably that they could better represent their interests on their own and give voice to their interests on their own.	But I must say that, and I think Pat will talk a bit more about this history, is a long history since the seventies of cooperation between the SAUJ and what became Mwasa to the extent when Zakes refers to the strike which they had at the SABC, SAUJ held pickets outside SABC offices in sympathy with that strike in '92 I think.  And there was ongoing cooperation.	We made available, although the employers were not happy about it, we made available half our seats on the Newspaper Conciliation Board to Mwasa despite the fact that we weren't obliged to do that.  I think that hopefully the foundation has been laid for closer cooperation in the future as well.	One of the points that I make in terms of looking at the future is journalists and journalist institutions are weakened by their separation, by internal squabbling and I think if the TRC can achieve something in pointing a way to a kind-of unified position for the media, a bottom line for which we can all stand and which we can all support it will have achieved a lot.	Perhaps Pat would like to talk a little bit about the relationship between the Unions and the critical years of the eighties where white journalists, in fact all journalists, but our members particularly, there was a leadership within the Union that started to come through, which had grown up perhaps in slightly different atmosphere, grown up together with the UDF and started to take on the State in a more direct way in perhaps following on the lines that their black colleagues had had a decade or so before.