On August 29, former SABC journalist and editor of RSG’s Monitor and Spektrum, will be discussing his book with Lowvelders at Orange Restaurant. The venue is almost fully booked, so make sure that you get your seat today by phoning 083-628-7759.
Read the excerpt of the book below:
The SABC’s decision to ban coverage of violent protests led not only to the question of how to deal with it as a journalist, but also as a media outlet reporting on its own affairs. It is a dilemma every public broadcaster must face. On the one hand it must report objectively on news events, but on the other hand, as one of 131 state-owned enterprises and the biggest communications outlet in the country, it is bound to be in the news and must therefore be held responsible in the same way as others.
As a journalist, I believed there was only one way to handle it: put the facts on the table, get all affected parties to react and then give the SABC the right to reply. In the end we should be accountable to our owners: the people of South Africa. And that’s exactly what we did. On Friday 27 May 2016 we set up a discussion for our Monday morning news actuality programme and invited Professor Franz Krüger, the head of the journalism department at the University of the Witwatersrand, and Tim du Plessis, a former editor at Media24 and member of the South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF), to participate.
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We also invited self-appointed editor-in-chief Hlaudi Motsoeneng to speak on behalf of the SABC. Initially his office did not respond to the invitation, but we did get a message later in which he promised to come to the Monitor studio at a later stage to, in his words, ‘face the music’.
During the Monday discussion, Krüger and Du Plessis did not mince words. They both believed that management’s decision was incompatible with not only best practices, but also the SABC’s own editorial principles. It was a worrying decision so shortly before the coming election. Krüger, who was part of the broadcaster’s post-1994 news management team to transform the organisation into a true public broadcaster, believed that this was a step backwards.
The following morning, Motsoeneng arrived at our studio for an interview. He was accompanied by Anton Heunis, a retired SABC manager who did a short stint as acting CEO in 2015 before ill health forced him into retirement after forty-four years of service. It is rumoured that his pension package was the highest ever paid out to an SABC employee.
He was back now, as Motsoeneng’s personal advisor, at a salary of more than R4 million per year. After the interview, the two men confronted me about the merits of the previous day’s show. In a heated confrontation I expressed my dismay over the fact that news staff had to read about the ban on social media and the general lack of communication between top management and the newsroom. Motsoeneng then summoned me, Sebolelo Ditlhakanyane and the current affairs executive producer of SAfm, Krivani Pillay, to his office on the twenty-seventh floor of the radio building.
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