| Time | Summary | |
| 19:36 | One such person is Craig Kotze, a former crime reporter for the Star, who was recruited as an undercover agent for the police security branch. Kotze, who is now media advisor to the national police commissioner, admitted for the first time this week that he’d been a spy. But his confession came as no surprise in media circles. | Full Transcript |
| 19:56 | On certain newspapers, Inkatha members sitting in certain newspapers, within the SABC … // Craig when you were a journalist did you work for the police or not? // No. // You didn’t work for the police? // No. // Well, you came into the police with a high rank for someone who didn’t. // Because I was a good journalist and was trained by the best newspaper group in the country at the time. | Full Transcript |
| 20:12 | Did you ever before today disclose that fact that you were a policeman when you were serving on the Star? // No I did not. // Is it today the first time actually that you disclose that? // That I’m disclosing that, yes. Other people may have had, Mr. Chair if I may add, their suspicions and I think it may even have been reflected in the media once or twice, but I believe this is the first confirmation. …I have in support of reconciliation come clean with disclosure of my personal role as a security police intelligence agent in the media. The new South African police service has no agents whatsoever inside the media and has a policy of never recruiting such agents. | Full Transcript and References |
| 20:50 | I was never ideologically or politically motivated. // The intelligence game as we like to call it… // I did not wake up every day and say good morning South Africa, another fine day to defend apartheid. // It was a bizarre world those years, very bizarre in fact. | Full Transcript |
| 21:23 | During this week’s hearings many men and one woman placed the role of mainstream newspapers during the 60s, 70s and 80s under a harsh spotlight. As the former editor of the newspaper Vrye Weekblad I also made a submission. There were blunt accusations that racism ran unchecked through the news rooms owned by the white press barons, that the mainstream press kept crucial information away from South Africans and more, that they had actively colluded with an increasingly repressive government. The newspaper bosses who spoke were not from the old order, but they spoke on behalf of the old. There were apologies, but there was insistence too that they had a big part in the breakdown of apartheid. | Full Transcript and References |
| 22:06 | In 1968 with the launch of the Black Consciousness movement I ventured into newspaper’s news rooms. What did I find at the Rand Daily Mail? I found black people sitting in a corner designated for black journalists. Mayakiso, Mojapelo these people were put in a corner; they ate in a separate canteen with iron plates, iron mugs, iron spoons while their white counterparts ate from porcelain. I found this and I objected to that. I objected very strongly to the fact that black journalists were allowing themselves to be demeaned. | Full Transcript and References |
| 22:49 | There was more to that, the existence of separate apartheid style newspapers necessitated the demarcation of news rooms on racial lines, even if it was not said so in words in practice it was there. The staffing of the segregated newsroom was also on racial lines and I’m speaking from experience Mr. Chairman because I worked there on these newspapers. Obviously from this flowed the next logical step that pay scales were miles apart for white and black journalists. Again, paying different salaries determined by race to people doing the same job was blatantly discriminatory and was an obvious violation of our human rights. | Full Transcript |
| 23:38 | I have no reason whatsoever to doubt the allegations that had been made about discrimination within the newsrooms. I’m sure there was discrimination in those newsrooms as a result of the law of the time or because of personal prejudice or insensitivity or human weakness. And I want to say Mr. Chairman that Times Media Ltd sincerely regrets any such indignities that were imposed upon people in our news rooms. But was there a policy of discrimination? I do not believe so. | Full Transcript |
| 24:10 | There was also some law which determined that while people of any racial group could rise to supervisory and management positions; they could only do this so long as those they supervised or managed were of the same racial group with the exception of course of whites. This meant that there was a ceiling on the number of blacks who could take up jobs in the news room. But more importantly, it prevented blacks from taking up senior positions where they would have supervisory powers over whites. There is no doubt that had SAAN or the Mail tried to take on more blacks on the editorial staff or elevated a black to a supervisory role over whites in the editorial department someone in the production department, which was populated by conservative whites, would have blown the whistle and the company would have been in trouble. | Full Transcript |
| 24:55 | Our newspaper’s staffs were generally too white and in the critical editorial area black staff began to be introduced on any serious scale only during the 1970s. It’s also our view that our company’s newspapers made insufficient attempts to generate news from disadvantaged communities and we accept the charge that was made this morning that this created a distorted view of South African society as a whole. | Full Transcript |
| 25:28 | The legislation did play a very vital role in hindering the free flow of information during those days, but that is an excuse that is used by people who ran the media at the time ... as an excuse for not having gone further in exposing the atrocities and the injustices that were happening in the country. The media houses could have gone much further in exposing police brutality in townships for instance. And they chose not to, they deliberately chose not to. They could have done much more to challenge those very acts which inhibited the press from doing its job. They chose not to do that. They in fact went into agreements with the government to prevent the free flow of information. | Full Transcript |
| 26:29 | I want to charge all the mainstream newspapers, every single one of them, English language and Afrikaans language, with collusion with apartheid. I also want to charge them Mr. Chairman with having a hand directly or indirectly in the murder of thousands of black people by the apartheid army and police. I am not off my rocket. | Full Transcript |
| 26:57 | Then the editorials stank; they were stinking. Particularly on the issue of the military, excursions into the frontline states, ‘mopping up operations’ the one advert editorial says. The SADF went in and they mopped up, they cleaned up Lesotho, they cleaned up Matola, they cleaned up Botswana. They didn’t say that pieces of flesh were lying on the trees. | Full Transcript |
| 27:25 | Why is all this relevant Mr. Chairman? My point about all this detail is that if the mainstream newspapers and the SABC had reflected and followed up on all these confessions and revelations, every single one subsequently proved to have been true, the government would have been forced to then put a stop to the torture, the assassinations and the dirty tricks. It would have saved many, many lives and South African citizens and politicians would not have been shocked or pretended they were shocked at the revelations before the Truth Commission the last year. | Full Transcript and References |
