FREEDOM OF PRESS IN SOUTH AFRICA

Southland Times, Issue 23826, 25 May 1939, Page 5

FREEDOM OF PRESS IN SOUTH AFRICA

STATEMENTS ABOUT HEADS OF FOREIGN STATES

LONDON, May 20. The Cape Town correspondent of The Times says that the Prime Minister’s Office has confidentially communicated the gist of legislation to preserve the freedom of the Press to prominent journalists. It is known that the legislation is directed against the prevention of defamatory statements about the heads of foreign States.

Believing that he had a certain freedom of criticism as editor, Mr D. E. McCausland, K.C., editor of The Cape Argus, one of South Africa’s leading newspapers, criticized what Mr Chamberlain was doing at Munich last September, and was sacked. Mr McCausland has told the story in a pamphlet of the League for the Maintenance of Democracy.

“The general manager told me bluntly that he had orders from the board to request my immediate resignation,” Mr McCausland said. "I asked for the reasons. He said he could not give me any. I asked what the alternative would be. He said: ‘Dismissal.’ The terms were a year’s salary if I resigned, six months’ salary if I preferred to be dismissed.

"The order for my expulsion came direct from the chairman, Mr John Martin, who is in London and has been there for the past four months, during which time he has never once communicated with me direct.

“When speaking to me on the telephone, the general manager asked if I had received a circular which had actually reached me the day before. The gist of it, concealed in much sonorous verbiage, was that the company's newspapers should ‘suspend criticism’ and ‘refrain from criticism’ of the British Government’s position and policy in the European crisis. “Although worded as an 'urgent representation,’ and not as an instruction, I naturally took the circular to be an instruction, and realized that a new situation had arisen. Such a thing had never occurred before in all the years of my association with The Cape Argus. Nevertheless I decided to comply, leaving the question of principle to be discussed later. “You will observe, however, that there was no opportunity to give effect to it. The 'decision to get rid of me must have been taken as a result of something published before the new instructions reached me, and I have reason to believe that it was due to a garbled version appearing in an English newspaper.”