thing called the Internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year.
"It makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest," said Kerry.
The challenge of journalism, of course, is to sort through the blizzard of information, including leaked secret documents, to test acquired data against the standards of relevance, accuracy, slander, propriety and to hold steadfastly to the principle goal of the public's rights to know.
The government’s goals are often quite the opposite. Just as Secretary Kerry complained about overloading the public in the Internet age, South Africa said much the same about the snail-paced press providing “secret” information during its oppressive reign of the apartheid days.
To fulfill the citizenry’s right-to-know, the free, fair, and courageous press, “one of the great bulwarks of liberty,” as Jefferson put it, must be protected always against the restraints of “a despotic government.” Such was the case certainly in South Africa.
Incidentally, the Newsday reporter in the Soweto case study is yours truly. And, upon the impending prison release of Nelson Mandela, the consul-general in New York phoned to invite me personally to cover the occasion.
My dozen-year banning, Pretoria reckoned, gave me the journalistic credibility needed to inform a skeptical American public that the regime was turning ‘irreversibly” away from apartheid. This demand, along with Mandela’s release, was the key condition required for lifting the punishing U.S. economic sanctions Congress had passed over the veto of President Reagan.
After interviewing Mandela in his Soweto backyard, I subsequently covered his triumphant 1990 visit to the U.S. and jetted from Detroit to Los Angeles with the ex-political prisoner who became the president of South Africa. g
Photo credits: Courtesy of Les Payne
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The Prisons Act discouraged reporting information about those who died in police custody.