No one likes to bring comparisons from pre-1994 into today’s landscape, but the SABC’s censorship patterns are of a similar vein. It highlights the fear of a ruling party, that it has to control the message sent out to the majority of the population, well because the truth of the matter will hurt them. The man pulling the strings is Hlaudi Motsoeneng who’s banned protests, banned call-ins and this weekend banned a showed called ‘The Editors’. Cape Messenger editor Donwald Pressly like Steuart Pennington felt the SAFM show was one of the few worth listening too. He voices his concerns around the shutting down of free expression, as the ruling party slowly erodes the democratic era so many fought for. – Stuart Lowman

By Donwald Pressly*

The South African Broadcasting Corporation, the so-called public broadcaster, has turned the full circle to the days of Dr Piet Meyer, broadcasting architect of apartheid. Now we have a new bunch of authoritarians running the establishment headed by chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng. The colour of the management has simply changed from white to black. The junta-like attitude is the same.

As a school kid, I remember being forced to listen to the daily “comment”, just ahead of the 7am radio news on what my father used to call “the A programme”, in English. The comment was simply poisonous National Party propaganda. It reinforced the apartheid philosophy of the ruling party of the day. Now after a hopeful period where the broadcasting environment opened up after FW de Klerk’s reform speech in 1990 (and then after 1994 was turbocharged into a democratic broadcasting era), we have limped back to His Master’s Voice – at least as far as the state broadcaster is concerned.

These days television news is just execrable, but radio is a little better. However, the one programme worth listening to was The Editors on SAFM before it was axed last week. It was shifted, some years ago, from a 12 noon slot on Sundays – for half an hour – to an hour from 8am on Sundays. Nigel Murphy was the presenter for years (he also presented the must-listen-to Microphone In). More recently Elvis Preslin – who shares a home town with me, Kimberley – has been a very able director of the show. He ticked all the right boxes. He is black, he is articulate and has an inquiring mind. But that is not what the SABC wants. It wants propaganda merchants, who portray the ruling party, the ANC, in the best possible light. So he and his programme had to go. Officially the reason was that The Editors was tired. It was just “time for change” after 20 years, a SABC official was quoted as saying.

The programme invited journalists to capture the best stories of the past week and also to predict the main news stories of the oncoming week. Unfortunately the bulk of journalists, most of them drawn from the print media, have been pretty inarticulate. Sometimes they are downright boring. Some of them have been astonishingly poorly informed, even about the newspapers for which they work. But every so often sensible journalists like Mathatha Tsedu, a former editor of the Sunday Times, Ferial Haffajee, outgoing editor of City Press, Adriaan Basson, the new editor of News24, and Ranjeni Munusamy of the Daily Maverick – who, by the way, has an outstandingly incisive mind – were a joy to listen to. But they often said things that were not terribly flattering of the ruling party. I happened to listen to comments on SABC radio while driving in the Karoo this week. One caller said that the programme aired journalists who had an axe to grind with government. “The programme sounded like an opposition party,” was one SMS. It is an insight into the crooked thinking of the SABC and, most likely, captures the mentality of the organisation exactly.

It is quite extraordinary that the SABC still believes that it can channel and “educate” people in the right ideological (and political) direction in the days of multi-media access by millions of South Africans. Motsoeneng has argued that coverage of public violence – particularly directed at public buildings – should not be filmed. He also, at one stage, wanted all phone-in commentary banned. The entity is giving its best shot to turning its operation into an Orwellian thought-control operation. One lives in hope that other radio stations take up where the SABC has left off.

Donwald Pressly, Editor of Cape Messenger

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