Open letter to Jeremy Cronin

Dear Jeremy,

I am deeply disappointed in the South African Communist Party and in you personally for supporting censorship in the form of a media tribunal. You have lost my respect as an intellectual and as a democrat.

The occasion for my letter is your article in Umsebenzi Online. I would respond directly online, but the SACP website does not allow me to do so, and perhaps this is symbolic.

Let’s call the media tribunal by its proper name, censorship, and not sanitise it with terms like “independent regulation of the news media” or other euphemisms. Together with other proposed protection of information legislation it is a worrying development.

The Constitution will probably not allow a media tribunal, but that is not the point.

The point is that you have lent your authority to this sinister attempt to stifle free speech, without looking at the law, and without seriously examining the record of the Press Ombudsman. It is intellectually shoddy to write on such an important issue as news media freedom without doing some basic, real research.

It is galling that you and the party have ignored the fact that the news media is already ruled by law in several respects.

There are quite rightly limitations on what you or I or the Sunday Times can say. Apart from prohibitions on hate speech, crimen injuria and defamation law curtail our complete freedom. These are part of our law.

Moreover, any journalist writing about a commercial entity must be aware there is the possibility of substantial damages being awarded for loss of profits.

Why is a media tribunal necessary when laws already exist to discipline journalists and non-journalists?

You pose the same question. “So what about the courts? Civil action against libel needs, of course, to be an option, but it is costly, prolonged and often inconclusive.”

It is true that the poor have difficulty suing for defamation, but generally the law favours the rich. This is a bigger problem than can be solved by a media tribunal. Because it is expensive, the Ombudsman exists to give some recourse to those who want to bypass the courts.

A media tribunal could not use the informal methods now employed by the Ombudsman, and the Appeal Panel attached to it. Legal representation is not allowed at the Ombudsman and Appeal Panel hearings, and oppositional legal tactics are discouraged. It’s more like an arbitration.

To be fair and just, a media tribunal would have to be a highly formal affair, with legal representation allowed for both parties. How is that better than the current system of the courts or the Ombudsman process?

You say in your Umsebenzi Online column that journalists should not be jailed, or fined, but newspapers should be fined instead.

As an intelligent man, you must know that you cannot simply fine newspapers without affecting the journalists who work for those newspapers.

The effect, at the very least, will be to make at least some newspaper proprietors and their employees look over their shoulders, to make them more timid. I have already seen this happen during the apartheid years at English-language South African newspapers. I thought we had left this era behind.

And it is clear that newspapers, because they may at times serve the Opposition, because they are commercially driven, are the target.

Few newspapers could afford to be fined regularly. The resulting climate of fear would mean mainstream newspapers would take few risks, and citizens would have to resort to the internet or some other source for real news.

Talking of the internet, what about regulation of websites? The SACP frequently uses Umsebenzi Online to prosecute its interests, for instance its battle against former treasurer Phillip Dexter. Will that be subject to regulation? Could one take the website to the tribunal?

At the moment, there isn’t even space to leave comments on the website, something all newspaper sites now make space for.

You can write letters to newspapers, and one of our finest journalists, Max du Preez, has done just that to plead with the ANC not to introduce a tribunal.

In a letter to Business Day, he writes: “As frustrated as I sometimes am, as a veteran of 35 years in journalism, with some of the reporting and trends in the media, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that the proposed tribunal will not improve journalism in SA.”

Of course, our journalism is not exactly spotless.

Your take is that with “profit maximisation, then we will tend to get exactly what we are often getting. Trashy tabloids aimed at the working class, and acres of middle-class whingeing in what passes for serious journalism. In short, journalism that panders to the lowest common denominator in its target audience”.

As a former professional journalist, I am also not always happy about what the news media focuses on, the behaviour of some of our reporters, and the effect of commercial pressures on quality, but you and I know that censorship will not help.

I direct you to the amusing and thought-provoking play by former journalist Tom Stoppard, Night and Day, which is a superb examination of the issues of press freedom.

In the play, the idealistic young reporter Jacob Milne says: “Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.”

By contrast the fictional, LSE-educated dictator in the play believes the press should be, like his government-owned Daily Citizen, “responsible and relatively free”.

He asks another journalist, Dick Wagner: “Do you know what I mean by a relatively free press, Mr Wagner? … I mean a free press which is edited by one of my relatives.”

The logic of your support for a media tribunal in your online column, Jeremy, is nowhere so flimsy as in your deduction that a recent plethora of newspaper apologies proves that self-regulation is not working.

Surely that newspapers run apologies, sometimes spontaneously and without the intervention of the Ombudsman, means that self-regulation is working?

An absence or paucity of apologies would show that self-regulation is NOT working.

Newspapers and journalists, even the best, make mistakes. The mistakes range from the merely embarrassing to the career-threatening, from minor errors of judgement to serious defamation.

No journalist likes to be sued, but no normal journalist is happy to see any apology appear for a story he or she has written. Trust me on this.

However, you say that apologies are insufficient and that fines are necessary.

It has become clear that the biggest single threat to freedom of speech in the UK and now elsewhere in the world is the heavy fines that are levied there for libel, so much so that the UK has attracted a kind of “libel tourism” by wealthy non-residents availing themselves of UK law to sue.

You do not, however, have to listen to me, since I am a former member of the Press Ombudsman’s Appeal Panel.

Listen instead, to an activist who was also jailed by the apartheid regime, Guy Berger, who has eloquently laid out the fundamental reason for opposing a tribunal, in his Converse column: “You can’t increase state power over what may be published and still argue that your country has media freedom.”

Or listen to Du Preez again: “I am appealing to the many ANC members of influence, who know in their hearts that this campaign is not actually about so-called ‘brown-envelope’ or irresponsible journalism, to stand up and stop this reckless effort to undermine the freedoms of all South African citizens.”

I can only urge you to regain your instinct to “speak truth to power” and to entrench democracy by not acquiescing and instead actively oppose any further attempts to subvert freedom of speech.

Yours sincerely,

Reg Rumney