Significant influence
Right2Know national coordinator Mark Weinberg, who revealed this week that the campaign has emerged vibrant with significant influence in the public discourse, said a national dialogue will be hosted in January 2011 to strengthen and consolidate the campaign without distracting from its primary task - to educate, mobilise and organise to stop the Secrecy Bill.
The Protection of Information Bill, which has in the past few weeks undergone a couple of 'cosmetic' changes - as critics of the bill put it - continues to cause uproar, mostly due to the ruling ANC's fierce opposition to 'protect' journalists who publish 'classified' information from being jailed, arguing that they have done so in the public interest.
ANC parliamentarian ad-hoc committee chairperson Cecil Burgess was quoted by media reports as saying: "The issue we need to consider is in which way is the bill interfering in the rights of whistleblowers. The bill says you have the right to run to the police. It is in no way allows you to rush off the media." Burgess also said the topic [introducing a media protection clause] was not up for discussion at this stage, The Citizen reports today.
Series of dialogues at provincial level
Weinberg said the national dialogue, which will discuss the campaign's scope, strategy and structure, will be initialised by a series of dialogues at provincial levels, notably in Gauteng, Kwazulu-Natal and Western Cape.
It is believed that the Right2Know Campaign might broaden its scope to include topics such as opposing the effort to legislate the ANC-proposed media appeals tribunal (MAT), promoting the use of the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) to enable access to information in practice and campaigning for greater diversity of media ownership.
SA is the one of the few countries in the world where media ownership is heavily concentrated at the hands of a few, mostly whites, and critics of the media continue to argue that the industry has seen very little transformation in the past decade to the dismay of the ruling ANC.
Public Service Broadcasting Bill
Furthermore, Weinberg said Right2Know also intends to take up the fight to oppose parts of the Public Service Broadcasting Bill, which it says threaten the independence of community and public broadcasting.
Right2Know also said it will, among others, do whatever it takes to defend the independence of the Independent Communication Authority of South Africa (ICASA), which is on the verge of being 'hijacked' by the government and profit-obsessed corporate, for own their own selfish gains.
Lastly, it said it intends promoting the sustainability of community media, including the demand for increased funding for the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA), and the reduction of Sentech transmission rates.
Launched on 31 August 2010, Right2Know claims to have massively grown over the past two months, having been boosted by over 400 organisational and 11 000 individual endorsements.
