EDITORIAL: The decline and fall of the SABC
Faith Muthambi plays the fiddle while the SABC burns
The parliamentary hearings on the SABC this week invoke an old truism; however bad you might think things are, it’s almost inevitable that they are much worse. The hearings will continue this week, but even what we have heard so far has been shocking and frightening. What we knew before the hearings was bad enough. The SABC has totally relinquished its legal and ethical mandate. It’s easy to be cynical about this failure, because as many have argued, the SABC always has been the compliant tool of the government in power, stretching back as far as its establishment. But precisely because of the venality of the organisation during the apartheid era, a comprehensive set of rules, principles, procedures and structures were established in law to make sure it would never happen again. And yet, it did. And it has. And it continues. All of the elaborate procedures have been swept away by "Hurricane Hlaudi" with a contempt that makes a mockery of legality and public broadcasting ethics. Howe...
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