JOHANNESBURG (Islam Online) - South Africa's media chiefs were unwilling to look at how they could be furthering racial discrimination and other prejudices, an independent researcher mentioned at a hearing on media racism.
Claudia Braude said at the start of South African Human Rights Commission's public hearings into the issue that she had met with hostility when compiling a report on media racism.
The report, released in November, found that the South African media was riddled with racism, six years after the demise of apartheid in 1994.
The report, dismissed as "psychobabble" by some newspapers, is part of the commission's attempts to probe media racism after complaints by groups of black lawyers and accountants of "subliminal racism" in newspapers.
It found, for example, that one radio station presented Muslims as “fundamentalist murderers” and that some newspapers had suggested that black political leadership would result in the breakdown of civilization.
Braude, an independent researcher, said the document reflected much of the opinion of senior journalists and was compiled after close scrutiny of the media.
"It is not me sucking out of my thumb the notion that people see black politicians as corrupt," she said. "All of us come from a legacy of apartheid, which we cannot deny is a racist legacy ... we should scrutinize this." She said South Africa's young democracy depended on press freedom, but: "If the media are not open to robust criticism, that becomes a threat to media freedom."
The South Africa National Editors' Forum (SANEF) "acknowledged that there is racism in the media," said vice-president Ryland Fisher, and wanted to address this through debate. "You will find that the editors have little, if anything, to hide," he told the commission.
The commission attracted media fury when it subpoenaed more than 30 news bodies, including the London-based Financial Times, to the hearings, threatening a jail term for nonattendance. The subpoenas were slammed as "aggressive" by editors, and the commission was persuaded to withdraw them.
