Cape Town - Journalists across the country are rallying to support their SABC colleagues speaking out against media censorship. On Friday, journalists plan to picket outside the SABC offices in Auckland Park in Joburg and Sea Point to demonstrate against censorship measures and journalists who have been suspended for defying them.
Cape Argus editor Gasant Abarder, who is helping to organise the Cape Town picket, said it was important to stand in solidarity with SABC staffers calling for media freedom.
“This is not about us or our respective media houses, but a direct assault on our profession and press freedom,” Abarder said.
Picket leaders in Cape Town and Joburg have applied to their respective authorities for public gathering permits, which are currently being processed.
The picket comes in the wake of SABC chief operations officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng banning the airing of violent protest footage, banning the reading of newspaper headlines on air and calling for positive coverage of President Jacob Zuma.
This week, acting chief executive Jimi Matthews resigned in protest, saying what was happening at the public broadcaster was “wrong and (he) can no longer be a part of it”.
Three senior SABC journalists have been suspended for questioning Motsoeneng’s ban on protest footage and taking issue with a directive not to cover a protest that Right2Know staged outside SABC offices last week.
Political parties, unions, NGOs and civil society groups across the country have added their voices to the criticism of the SABC.
The SACP has also planned a picket in support of the suspended journalists at SABC offices next week.
Its Gauteng provincial secretary Jacob Mamabolo said mass action would follow if the SABC ignored their demands.
“The pickets will include a memorandum urging the SABC to reverse its apartheid-style draconian censorship of protest footages and to bring to an end the ongoing administration and governance decay prohibiting the public broadcaster to deliver on its public mandate responsibilities,” he said.
“Failure by the SABC to accede to the demands will be met with rolling mass action in the form of marches.”
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa condemned the suspension of the three journalists and demanded their immediate and unconditional reinstatement.
Spokesman Patrick Craven said the public broadcaster was betraying its purpose, and that the damage would hit the poor worst of all.
“By censoring images of anti-government protests which the government does not want the people to see, the SABC is betraying its mandate to be the voice of and for all the people of South Africa and becoming an authoritarian media channel for the government and ruling party, making it impossible to trust to be painting a truthful picture of South African society,” Craven said.
“All this is particularly alarming because for millions of the poorest South Africans in rural areas, the SABC is their main or even only source of news and they are therefore being deprived of access to true reports of what is happening in the country and being fed pro-government and pro-capitalist propaganda.”
Cape Argus