Broadcasting Amendment Bill

Tuesday, 13 August 2002

Kent Durr MP – ACDP


African Christian Democratic Party MP Mr Kent Durr today expressed his party’s opposition of the Broadcasting Amendment Bill, which is to be published today. The Bill will seek to ensure governments control over the SABC’s news bulletins, by forcing the SABC board to obtain government approval of its ‘policies governing the exercise of accurate, fair and accountable reporting.’

Mr Durr said, “We have the Three Estates; the government, the judiciary and the legislature. The Media is often referred to as the Fourth Estate. Their constitutional position is the same as that which governs freedom of speech of the individual as upheld in the current Broadcasting Act. However the proposed amendments to the Bill will remove this freedom.

There has to be a Chinese wall between the state and the media. Governments are not good at running the media. The best example of this is that all the state media corporations and newspapers in Zimbabwe are technically bankrupt, in spite of their monopoly position and state support.

In free societies there is a certain tension between governments and the media, this is healthy and needs to be protected at all costs, not smothered by government intervention in the process.

What should be a natural and freely diversified media development process now threatens to become transformed into a controlled process implicated by the financial sanction of central government.

The big problem of course is that he who pays the piper calls the tune,” said Mr Durr.



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For further comment please call Kent Durr MP at (021) 403 2472 or ACDP Media Liaison Liza Bloemetje at 082 4781037