Hear+no+truth,+see+no+truth+on+SABC+,+Karima+Brown,+Weekender

Business Day Weekender, Johannesburg, 2007/04/28 12:00:00 AM
=Hear no truth, see no truth on SABC=

JUST when I think things couldn’t possibly get worse at the SABC, they do. Has anyone listened to SAfm’s morning current affairs programme, AM Live, recently? It’s torture. Not only are Jeremy Maggs and Tshepiso Makwetla nowhere near the standard set by John Perlman and Nikiwe Bikitsha. But Maggs also just tries too hard. The less said about Makwetla the better.

Instead of interviewing news makers, Maggs subjects poor listeners to his banal opinions.

A colleague hit the nail on the head when she said: “The problem with Jeremy is that he is trying to be John, but only succeeds in sounding arrogant. It is actually quite offensive.”

But I digress. What I am on about is SABC management’s latest decision to ban an advert. The Star ran a story on Thursday reporting that the behemoth’s management recently refused to flight the Sowetan’s Freedom Day advert, ostensibly because it did not adhere to the SABC’s “broadcasting compliance regulations”.

For those who have not seen the advert — an adaptation of Martin Luther King Jr’s well-known 1963 “I have a dream” speech — it goes like this: “I still have a dream, I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up against each other and erupt into an oasis of crime, grime and home to racial attacks and injustice.

“I have a dream that my children will be repeatedly raped, sodomised and left to fend for themselves long after HIV and AIDS have taken me away. I have a dream today. I have a dream one day farmers shall be brutally murdered and workers thrown into lions’ dens.

“Let chaos ring from the streets of SA — and when this happens we will all join hands and sing: ‘Free at last! Free at last!’ Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! What have you done with Freedom, SA. Don’t let it go to waste. Cherish it.”

Thought-provoking, yes. Especially for those among us who suffer from selective amnesia about our country’s ugly past. In fact, the inverted message contained in the advert serves as a call to action for complacent South Africans who take our freedom for granted.

It speaks to all the social ills plaguing our nascent democracy and implores South Africans to roll up their sleeves and take responsibility. No different from what our political leaders keep on telling us. Right? The ad gets my vote and certainly beats those dreary platitudes that we are routinely subjected to when nasal-sounding government officials yap on and on about our “rainbow nation” and how we are all one!

Gauteng-based Radio 702 ran the advert, saying the provocative message made a great fit, given its position in the market. Radio 702, unlike most of the SABC, is run along commercial lines. But as far as I know, no broadcaster is allowed to flight messages bordering on “hate speech”.

If the SABC’s refusal to flight the Sowetan advert had been an isolated incident, one could still perhaps have entertained some of SABC management’s concerns about the advert’s content. But unfortunately, it points to something much more worrying — growing thought control and censorship at Auckland Park, a development that does not augur well when SA takes stock of how far it has come since 1994.

As the largest news organisation in Africa, the SABC is an important national instrument. So it is hardly surprising that many, including the government, will try to exert influence over its operations. One expects that from politicians. It happens across the world.

What is worrying is that SABC management has appointed itself to be the nation’s guardian.

When labelling provocative messages hate speech, and banning them from the airwaves and television, this crowd takes it upon itself to tell the nation what it can hear or see. It is dangerous and we should all be worried.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=2667521**

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