South Africa Now had, in effect, been offered up to appease him. We called that decision a victory but knew that we had only won a small battle in a much more complicated war of images and legitimacy. Now resuscitated this controversy, quoting Horowitz to the effect that we were Marxist propagandists and the like, as if he had any credibility as a media critic, much less as an expert on South Africa. In the name of balanced journalism, we were continually put in the position of defending ourselves against charges that were never proven and were never true. There was no evidence, but there was an odor - and it stuck.
Many people believe that where there's smoke, there's fire, or at least a flame.
Now fast forward four years to March 18, 1994. A furious President F. W. De Klerk, who insisted he was not implicated, suspended the accused amid another major scandal. The fact that our report, four years and 5,000 lives earlier, pointed in this direction did not make us such great journalists. The same suspicions and more fragmentary reports were appearing in many South African newspapers even as the American mass media largely ignored them. WGBH in Boston took KCET's signal and moved to drop the show too, wisely avoiding citing the same rationale but operating with the same spirit.