The late Hennie Serfontein was not the first — and certainly won’t be the last — journalist to have his story spiked by his editor. Yet Anton Harber (Investigative reporting flowers again, August 7) casually slurs the former editor of the Sunday Times, Tertius Myburgh, for "censoring" Serfontein, "killing his story completely". He offers no supporting detail, but the clear accusation is that Myburgh prevented Serfontein from exposing the Broederbond. It is part of a tired old narrative that cast Myburgh as a puppet of the Nat regime. Harber never forgave Myburgh for his attempts, as editor-in-chief in the early 1980s, to turn the Rand Daily Mail from an irresponsible radical rag into a viable newspaper. Serfontein certainly played an important role in the outing of the Broederbond, but it was Sunday Times news editor Hans Strydom, under Myburgh, who finally "named and shamed" the Broeders. Geriatric calumnies against Myburgh keep surfacing; time to lay them to rest. Richard McNeillN...
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