‘Comfortable coma of submission’

Press, 10 November 1986, Page 20

‘Comfortable coma of submission’

.By

GEOFF MEIN,

a former ‘Press’ reporter who

is in Johannesburg.

Revolutions, according to a recent editorial in South Africa’s “Sunday Times,” do not run solely on people; they run primarily on ideas. “Gagging and imprisonment of people for holding unpopular views goes not one whit closer to challenging those ideas, or weakening their currency in aggrieved communities,” said the newspaper. Such challenges to the Government’s State of Emergency regulations are significant not only for their message, but for the fact that they are published at all. Curbs on the news media in South Africa effectively keep journalists out of the volatile black townships, severely inhibiting the coverage of specific instances of unrest. The issues, though, are still freely debated in the news, editorial and correspondence columns of the country’s leading journals. One letter-writer pointed out to the editor of a Natal newspaper: "If the ‘Sunday Tribune’ ... published a fraction of its criticism of Government in any other African State, it would do so only once. The Editor and staff would then disappear.” Yet the curbs, by South African press standard, go too far. Front page panels remind readers that emergency regulations make it impossible for newspapers to provide “all the essential news.” Restrictions on quoting banned or imprisoned persons, in force before the current emergency, continue to deny the public access to the thoughts of several key figures in the conflict. Some press restrictions have been quashed by the courts. Many, however, remain. A lawyer representing a group of English-language newspapers said the curbs constituted “such oppressive interference with the

rights of the public that (the curbs) can have no justification in the minds of right-thinking men.” White South Africans rate journalists, particularly foreign correspondents, in the same league as communists and anti-rugby-tour demonstrators. The Deputy Minister for Information, Mr Louis Nel, blames them for the imposition of sanctions against the Republic. Foreign journalists, he says, consistently report only the negative side of the country, making “a South African Rambo ongoing show with all the action and violence required by a commer-cially-proven recipe. The peaceful side of South Africa ends up on the editing floor.” In response, the Government has sought to control news of unrest by restricting the release of details to one source — its own Bureau of Information, from one source — the Government security forces. The State President makes the position quite clear: “If the press is prepared to co-operate properly with the authorities, they can get all the information that is necessary to publish.” Critics question the credibility of an agency that relies on an interested party for information. The respected “Financial Mail” says that, “at best, information emanating from the bureau lias been perceived ... as a sanitised version of reality. At worst, it is seen as evasive, propagandistic and inaccurate.” Mr Nel, who heads the bureau, was recently named “Newsmaker of the Year” by the Afrikaans Student Press Union. It is in the medium of domestic television that the Government has achieved absolute control. Journalists working for the

South African Broadcasting Corporation have become little more than a public relations army for Pretoria.

A documentary on population trends highlights the trickle of immigrants, especially those who return to South Africa disillusioned with. life away from home. It ignores the thousands of equally disillusioned emigrants. Other programmes feature racial discrimination in the United States, or portray liberation theology as a communist monster clasping the world in its talons.

The corporation admits that it tailors the news to what it sees as the public interest. But as “The Johannesburg Star” notes: “In this country public interest tends to become blurred with the interest of the National Party. It takes no account of public intelligence, the hunger for truth, or the resentment among millions of South Africans closer to events who know what they have experienced.”

Although the press is restricted and the official media slanted, there exist a surprising number of alternative journals, foreign magazines, monitoring reports, and foreign radio broadcasts. Some fail to escape the attention of the Government.,. Recent issues of “Time” magazine have sported the crude black lines of the censor. The entire text of an interview with the A.N.C’s acting president, Mr Oliver Tambo, was blacked out. in the October 27 issue.

But most bulletins survive intact, and those who generally want to know what is happening in South Africa can find out.

Sadly, many whites, conditioned to an unquestioning acceptance of authority, take the Government’s word as gospel.

A leading satirist, Mr PieterDirk Uys, laments that the man in the street has been frightened into a comfortable coma of sub-

mission. “Now not only are we spared the gruesome sight of dead black kids over our poached eggs in the morning, but we are now at last convinced that these terrible rumours about townships don’t, exist. There is no revolution! There is no crisis!” Undeterred, by such acquiescence, the editors and leader writers of the country’s independent newspapers continue to

question and defy the Govern-

ment. . Their challenge to Pretoria is summed up by the “Financial Mail”: “South Africa is at the crossroads. Either it presses ahead and forms a Government of national reconciliation with popular support; or, courage failing, it remains transfixed, like a mouse before a snake, and allows the forces of violence to tip the country into anarchy ...”

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