The truth will always out

IT is an often expressed wish of the South African police services that the communities they serve and protect, cooperate with them in the fight against crime by serving `as the eyes and ears of the community’.

Cooperation however, depends on an unhindered flow of reliable information between the SAPS and affected communities.

Last week we received impeccable information from medical sources that the monster of baby rape was again stalking our rural communities.

Two Zululand babies of two months and six months had been raped and hospitalised, but official police and hospital sources did not want to talk about it, saying, shockingly, that the Minster of Police Services was the only individual who could comment.

This is certainly not the way our official crime fighters can win the confidence of those community members whose families were violated and whose trust and cooperation they need to bring the criminals to book.

Are the officials simply following President Zuma’s cue when he told an audience of journalism students in Pretoria last week that reporting crime details in the media was `unpatriotic’?

His inspiration for this piece of ‘insight’ was, he said, ‘a Mexican reporter’ who told him that crime reporting ‘kept investors away’. Does this imply commercial factors should outweigh the safety and lives of our citizens in the priority stakes?

The President also advised the journalism students that newspapers were simply businesses obsessed with profit motive and hardly so-called watchdogs over community interests.

Such a simplistic generalisation is hardly worth commenting on, other than pointing out that without the media, vital communication with the people will be virtually non-existant.

There has, for the uninformed, been a flourishing free press tradition in southern Africa since the 1820s when the autocratic Governor of the Cape, Lord Charles Somerset, unsuccessfully tried to censor and then muzzle the South African Commercial Advertiser of Thomas Pringle and John Fairburn when they criticised his administration.

The ongoing encouragement of this tradition has been a vital element in the achievement our democracy, not to be belittled.