Nic Dawes [@NicDawes]  (until last month editor of South Africa’s Mail and Guardian newspaper) has a formidable reputation as an investigative journalist and campaigner for press freedom.  His last 2 years at the Mail and Guardian have been marked by tough struggles between leading South African journalists and the South African government,

As he prepared for a new challenge at the Hindustan Times in India, he talked to Rachael Jolley, Editor of Index on Censorship magazine about the importance of social media, which he said ‘outsources part of the editing function to the wider community’,  the moves by the ANC to put in place a Media Appeal Tribunal with political appointees, a secrecy bill that would have made it almost impossible for the public or the media to uncover evidence about corruption or to protect whistleblowers, and the way the Marikana Mine massacre eventually hit the headlines, though the Mail and Guardian had covered the appalling conditions at the mine a year earlier.

Despite his concerns, he says that the threats to press freedom in South Africa must be seen in an international context of growing use and abuse of secrecy legislation including in those established democracies like the US, and UK and Canada – this is emphatically not just a South Africal problem.

A full article by Rachael Jolley drawn from the interview, Mandela’s legacy too easily dismissed is to be found in the current edition of Index on Censorship

Tags: Free speech, freedom of the press, Index on Censorship