30 October 2024| 25 Rabi ul Akhir 1446
Former International Relations and Co Operation Minister Naledi Pandor has expressed concern at the media’s bias in covering geopolitical crises.
Pandor says the media has changed and has shown uneven applications of global rules. She was speaking at the 20th African Investigative Journalism Conference at the University of the Witwatersrand earlier today.
She says the most worrying thing is that countries that are the founders of free expression are today the most active abusers of the craft.
“The profession industry has been stained by embedded journalism, by runaway technology advances, by practice of reporting that does not require training or certification. And to some degree by the failure of the profession to form global bonds of solidarity to end harm as it was done through the liberation movements when we were fighting for freedom,” says Pandor.
Pandor says it is worrying how the world is quiet about media personnel who are being killed in Gaza. More than 140 journalists have been killed since the 07 October 2023.
Pandor says very little protection is provided for media practitioners in the field.
“In 2020, when I was still close to the Home Affairs Ministry that I had just left, you would recall we had COVID-19 and we had lock down rules. So, one day, I got a protest from an international media organisation about a journalist who had broken the lockdown rules and being held in a cell by police who arrested him. I got one major letter from a professional body and 102 protests in support of the journalist. Today, over 100 journalists have been killed in Palestine, I haven’t received a single petition in support. There’s something wrong and we must ask ourselves why,” says Pandor.
