950822

Editors' plea to end

foreign ownership

of S African media

CAPE TOWN: Foreign ownership of South African media should be restricted and the government should subsidise new radio stations and newspapers, the Chairman of the Black Editors' Forum Thami Mazwai said on Monday.

Anti-trust legislation should also be introduced to prevent one company from controlling newspaper production as well as the manufacture of newsprint and the distribution of newspapers; he told a sub-committee of South Africa's Constitutional Assembly.

The Constitutional Assembly is currently drafting a final constitution for the country.

The Black Editors Forum is a lobby group made up of the editors of publications sold primarily among the black community.

Mazwai, who is also Editor of the upmarket black business magazine Enterprise, said that although racial discrimination had been outlawed, the major media groups were still controlled exclusively by whites.

His organisation's call for constitutional limitations on the foreign ownership of media appeared to be mainly aimed at Independent Newspapers in South Africa.

"That the media should be controlled by foreigners is unthinkable. There must be a limit on the control of the media by foreign investors....foreign interest in local media must be limited to 20 percent," Mazwai said.

There was an international precedent for this in France and the United States where the number of international role-players had been restricted, he said.

Mazwai said it was not enough for the government to grant broadcasting licences to emerging radio stations but should also fund such stations and newspapers, possibly for a limited period, so that these media could cater for the poorer sections of society.

The Conference of Editors, a broader group representing black and white editors of the mainstream publications, called for freedom of expression to be protected in the constitution and "elevated to the highest plane of values."

In its submission to the committee, deputy chairman of the Conference of Editors John Patten said the constitutional provision giving citizens the right of access to information should be rewritten to allow the press access to this information.

At present, the contitution only provided for state information to be released if it was necessary to protect the rights of the citizen requesting the information, Patten said.

This precluded journalists, who were acting in the general interests of their readers, from obtaining such information, he said.-AP