The media cannot should not be complacent
By Sipho McDermott
(source: Mail & Guardian, Friday,11-03-2011)
Former Constitutional Court Judge Kate O’Regan opened the Regulations and Rights conference at the University of the Witwatersrand on Wednesday with a warning that the media need to be reflexive in applying their important role in keeping society democratic, and that the judicial landscape is working to ensure their freedom.
The conference, hosted by Wits Journalism and the South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef), is focused on interrogating the rights and responsibilities of African media.
“The press, like all institutions critical to democracy, needs to be reflexive,” she said. While warning that this powerful institution needs to wield its power carefully, she pointed to its importance for a healthy constitutional democracy: “Democracies are noisy places because of freedom of expression, whereas authoritarian societies are silent. What is slightly disconcerting about South Africa is we get worried by how noisy we are.”
Recent rulings internationally have made it clear that protection of privacy is of critical importance the closer one gets to the intimate life of an individual, but of decreasing importance the closer one moves to state institutions, she said. This freeing of reporting on the government is an “important constraint on the power of the state”.
In cases where people have brought libel and defamation cases against the media, O’Regan said there is an increasing legal trend towards accepting the importance of the professional codes of ethics that guide journalists’ work, with judgements’ primary criterion being if the journalist has worked with these codes. In such cases the journalist needs to prove that they did everything to ensure their information was correct and the story fair.
But in cases where the journalist does get it wrong, “The apology is a very important part of undoing damage,” she said
