TODAY Friday 02 May, members of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) will hold a protest outside the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) studios in Auckland Park. This will be a day before the 03rd of May which is the day that the United Nations (UN) General Assembly declared in 1993 as the World Press Freedom Day after a 1991 UNESCO General Conference recommendation.
Joining organisations such as the Right 2 Know (R2K) and Save the SABC (SOS), Numsa will use the protest to:
• salute journalists who under difficult and sometimes life-threatening conditions continue to ply their trade in pursuit of the fundamental rights of people to know and to have access to information.
• show its commitment to press and media freedom
• remind itself as an organisation that the right to know, freedom of the press and the right to have access to information are fully realisable when there is social ownership of the media, greater media diversity including community owned and democratically run media enterprises.
• assert that the rights of citizens to know and press freedom are threatened by concentration of the media in the hands of profiteers.
• argue that the rights to know and to have access to information require public investment in the sector and democratic control of the media.
Numsa will also use the protest outside SABC to:
• highlight how the so-called  public broadcaster is increasingly becoming a mouthpiece of the state and dominant factions within the ruling party
• indicate our awareness of the harassment within the corporation of dedicated journalists through use of old apartheid laws such as the National Key Points of 1980
• call for investment in the development of professional and empathetic journalists within the corporation
• call for an end to patronage and factional promotions within the SABC
• ask the corporation to desist from portrayal of ordinary people in a patronising manner that makes them subjects instead of actual agents of change
• demand more positive coverage of labour and community struggles
• pinpoint a growing and wilful underplaying of the state’s use of violence to quell legitimate working class and poor people’s protests
• show our determination to fight the promotion by the corporation of consumerism, crass materialism, individualism and strong capitalist values
• call on the board of the corporation to implement the recommendations of the Public Protector relating to corporate governance failures in the management of the affairs of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) by its management Board and financial mismanagement at the SABC involving the spiralling of financial expenditure.
Details of the protest action are as follows:
DATE: Friday 02 May 2014
TIME: 11.00 – 13.00
VENUE: (Cnr. Henley and Artillery Road), Auckland Park
Members of the media are hereby invited to attend and report.
Contact:
Castro Ngobese
National Spokesperson
Mobile: 0810111137 / 0836275197