The good news It was not all gloom on the media freedom front. Astute parliament-watchers and lobbyists ensured that two potentially pernicious pieces of draft legislation – the Companies Bill (in so far as it applied to the media) and the Protection of Information Act – were amended to make them more media friendly. The Protection of Information Act would have dragged a veil of secrecy over much wider areas of public and private information. It would have dulled the democratic effect of access to information legislation. At the time of writing, the draft had been sent back to the drawing board. The Companies Bill, a broad-ranging draft law to reform South African corporate law, would have hampered investigative journalists if the media had not picked up the issue. It sought to keep secret the companies’ register, an essential resource for investigative journalists. After representations to parliament by the Mail & Guardian, drawn up by Webber Wentzel-Bowens, the draft law was changed to keep the register public. In February, the Film and Publications Amendment Bill, which allows potential pre-publication censorship across a wide range of coverage was sent back to parliament by President Kgalema Motlanthe in a step welcomed by the South African National Editors’ Forum. Looking ahead to 2009 In 2009, the media and its allied organisations will have to operate at a number of levels to protect its freedom: Politically, the ruling ANC is often on the attack against the media as it tries to portray journalists as an elite out of touch with the aspirations of the people. The term used most often, and usually spittingly, is: “the bourgeois media”. Zuma is a far more litigious president of the ruling party than his two predecessors of the democratic era, Nelson Mandela and Mbeki. There are constant draft laws, which need to be assessed to ensure that they are in line with the constitutional protection of freedom of expression. This will require a legal response and possibly a permanent monitoring function. Across the industry, journalists are being retrenched and newsrooms restructured to counter a steep downturn in advertising revenue. This is an internal threat to media freedom that is not spoken about often enough. Watch-dogs are only as good as the teeth they are given by their owners and, with a decline in journalism, the dogs are being de-fanged. The media industry is in serious need of an audit of both the impact of the financial crunch and of measures that can be taken to protect quality journalism, which is essential to South Africa’ s development. So This Is Democracy? 2008 -82- Media Institute of Southern Africa