clock for their missing children at hospitals, police stations, morgues, shanty towns, even at relatives’ homes in neighboring countries; all in hopes that their loved ones had not been mass buried by the government in unmarked paupers graves, or secretly dropped from police helicopters into the sea.
The lone black reporter perceived it as a responsibility of journalism to report the depth of the slaughter fully and accurately; and to inform the families seeking closure and the world seeking answers. Accordingly, every single victim killed by the South African police, he felt, must be tallied and reported abroad and their names published in the local newspapers.
The three-week investigation entailed knocking on the doors of the township funeral homes; talking to gravediggers, funeral directors, and morticians; verifying the circumstances with frightened eyewitnesses; and double checking the body count against police ledgers and the secret records the government maintained at the Johannesburg Inquest Court and other files scattered about the bureaucracy.
The detailed investigation disclosed that the government-based 200-odd death toll cited by the foreign press was under-counted by a factor exceeding 350-percent! The reporter listed 853 names, ages, dates and circumstances of Africans killed by police during the protests.
Some 80 percent of the victims were less than 30 years old, with 35 percent of them teenagers. At least 10 were younger than 12. The slain included a 6 year old, two 4 year olds and three 5 year olds, one of whom police shot squarely between the eyes when she raised her tiny hand in what was said to be a “black power salute.”
The body-count story – published in Newsday upon the reporter’s return to New York – embarrassed the correspondents who had accepted the government’s lie. The findings prompted The New York Times’ copy desk, without attribution, to increase the death toll cited in its subsequent stories, from some 250-odd to “more than 600.”
The reaction of the outraged South African government, which did not dispute the Newsday death count, justified the prior concern about the sensitivity of the story and the safety of its reporter.
The apartheid regime jailed and tortured the African journalist who printed the Soweto victims’ names in Soweto newspaper, in which many families learned the fate of their missing relatives for the first time. The Newsday reporter, back in New York, was cited as something of a co-conspirator under the state security act for publishing material harmful to the government.
Not only was the offending reporter banned from South Africa for life, the consulate in New York informed Newsday that none of its journalists, whether black or white, would be granted a visa to cover stories in that republic—as long as the African-American reporter worked for the paper.
The revolt of the Soweto students fueled the global anti-apartheid movement that helped free imprisoned Nelson Mandela and turn South Africa irreversibly toward democracy. If the white-racist regime had succeeded in muzzling the press, the Boers would likely still control the government in Pretoria.
Herein resides the critical need for a vigorous press.
This South Africa case study demonstrates that – as everywhere else in our global village – an informed citizenry is better able to make sovereign decisions about vital aspects of their lives, large and small.
“Whenever the people are well informed,” Thomas Jefferson noted, “they can be trusted with their own government.”
Internally, the press must guard against cowardly, timid and racist tendencies of its reporters and editors. And these days especially, the public “trust-aspect” of journalism must be rescued from the greed of those corporate owners corrupting the media by claiming a First Amendment right strictly to earn ever-increasing, double-digit profits at the expense of trimming news coverage and firing reporters and editors.
During this period of transition for news-gathering, both in newspapers and broadcast, the new technology provides opportunities to wrest journalism away from the cold, dead hands of those greedy corporate owners who would otherwise blunt the public’s need-to-know.
Much about the archaic transmission of the news stories cited in the Soweto case has been dramatically changed by technology. Typewriters, telexes and recruited airport messengers are no longer needed to transmit copy and photographs around the globe. What once took a day to transmit is now done in a nanosecond.
However, the substance of reporters’ determined fact-gathering in the service of the public remains constant and this trust is the sweet-spot essence of journalism in a free society.
Throughout the snail-paced, media age of the latter half of the last century, American journalism stood witness against government in scores of noteworthy, historical encounters. The Civil Rights Movement, starting with
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