ALLISTER SPARKS: You know, I think the media has always had a lot of problems, but after a long career as a journalist, there's one that I think has not received as much attention as it should. And that, it's a two-edged factor, really. On the one hand, you have what Noam Chomsky has called the phenomenon of the elite consensus, and that is simply the notion that journalists, especially senior journalists and beat journalists who are covering particular issues or subjects, White House correspondents, for example, become part of the elite. They live with them. They become friends. They start thinking the same way. And the reporters, the journalists become dependant on their sources, the sources in turn dependant on them; it's a symbiotic relationship. But it's rather like journalists embedded in the military. They become part of the group. They socialize together. Often, their children go to the same schools even. And they start thinking that way.
Above all, journalists of that sort need their sources. They need to maintain access to their sources, so the last thing they want to do is give offense to the source, by suggesting that the source is not telling the truth. Now, you couple that with the fact that increasing -- you get increasing sophistication with the spin-doctoring, that every government and every government department now uses with increasing skill to put a particular spin on an event, particularly an embarrassing event. And more and more, it seems to me, the journalists who are so embedded with these sources -- socially, culturally, professionally, in every way -- they don't question that. They don't doubt that. They play along with it. They don't want to give offense. They want to maintain the access.
And I think that combination of the increasing skill of the spin doctoring and the dependence of the journalists on maintaining the source and becoming a friend of the source and part of that elite consensus, I think that is very much part of what has happened, particularly in the United States, where the spin doctoring skills are developed to a particularly high level. And journalists become reluctant to really go hard at it and crack that open and try and get to the truth, saying, “Hey, look, I don't believe this guy. He's putting a gloss on it. He's max-factorizing the facts, and I’m going to cut through that, and I’m going to give him a hard time.” There's not enough of that.
And I think this is one of the reasons -- of course, it's all magnified in times of war. When you have the additional pressures of patriotism, and the newspaper itself or the television network becomes fearful of being accused of being unpatriotic, of siding with the terrorists. These are knee-jerk responses. And it can be costly. I mean, people lost their jobs. I was in the United States at the time of 9/11, and, you know, some shows -- people running shows that offered criticisms were wiped out. They were removed, taken off the air.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you buck the system, from your own experience in South Africa and now?
ALLISTER SPARKS: Well, it's such an insidious, creeping disease, that you have, first of all, to become aware of its existence. And the individual journalist must become aware of the extent to which they're infected by it, and then, you know, the only way to do that is to determinedly revert to your professional instincts and to be questioning and to, you know, to be bold enough to put up with the consequences. I think you've got to maintain that challenging spirit. Otherwise, you're finished.
AMY GOODMAN: In South Africa, you were the editor of the Rand Daily Mail. You were an opposition newspaper editor. What did that mean then?
ALLISTER SPARKS: Well, I was on the newspaper for 23 years. I was also its political correspondent. So a large part of my life was spent in this combative situation. It was very difficult to live with. I mean, I took a battering, emotional battering. A stressful life. It took a toll on my family, on my family life. Not easy to do. I mean, there are easier ways to earn a living. But once you're in it, you know, you have to keep at it. What can I say about, you know, how was it?
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about --
ALLISTER SPARKS: It's not an easy way of life.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about the wiretapping. That's a topic that's very hot in the United States right now, domestic surveillance.
ALLISTER SPARKS: Well, you know, I think wiretapping was pervasive in South Africa. South Africa was never quite a totalitarian society, but it was authoritarian, and it had a very tough police state dimension to it. And they all used wiretapping. I mean, what was worse than wiretapping, I think, was the planting of spies in your midst, and you suddenly find that you've got people on your own staff who are actually members of the security services, who are spying on you, and you don't know that until they turn up in court and some other members of your staff are in the dock, being prosecuted under these so-called security laws.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you give us an example of that happening? These guys posed as reporters?
ALLISTER SPARKS: Yes, yes, until they turned up giving evidence for the state and were revealed to be Major So-and-so, you know, and they had been in the pay of the security cops, sort of South Africa's version of the Gestapo. And, you know, there they were. And it was, you know -- it led to this pervasive sense of discomfort with your own staff. Some people would do things or behave in a way that made you suspicious, but what do you do about that? How do you confront this? How do you deal with it? Do you go to your reporter and say, “Hey, look, are you a spy?” I did that on one occasion. And, of course, nobody is going to say, “Yes, of course, I am.”
On this particular occasion, I grilled the fellow quite intensively, and he got very emotional and swore on his mother's grave that he wasn't. Subsequently, it turned out he was, and he, as he was about to flee the country to go and write a book exposing everything, he came and spent an entire night weeping in my home, before he went off to the airport. I arrived back from my office, and my wife met me at the door and whispered when she met me outside -- I got in late -- and she whispered, she said, you know, “Gordon Winter is here.” And I said, “What on earth is he doing here?” And she said, “Well, he's unplugged all the telephones in the house, and he's put pillows over them, and he wants to see you.”
And we talked 'til dawn. He said, “I can't leave here and, you know, before dawn I've got to get to the airport. I have an old Volkswagen Beetle, and I’m just going to dump it at the airport, because they'll kill me if they know that I’m going abroad and I’m going to write a book exposing what the BOSS service, the Bureau of State Security, if I’m going to blow the whistle on them. And this was a man who had worked for me for three years. He then left the staff, gone to work for another newspaper, but had suddenly undergone some fit of remorse and did that.
But, you know, I always accepted that my own telephone was bugged. One got used to living that way. I frequently -- I was handling a particularly large scandal, which we worked on for two years on the paper. It ultimately brought down the government of John Vorster. It brought an end to his prime ministership. But in the course of this, we were pursuing some very senior government figures, who were profoundly corrupt, and they were buying influence. They were trying -- they even tried -- well, they did, in fact, buy the Sacramento Bee -- no, it wasn't the Bee, it was the other newspaper. I can't remember its name. They tried to buy the Washington news -- the Washington Star, that’s right. They tried to buy papers in Britain. And, you know, it was a huge, huge spider's web of intrigue that was --
AMY GOODMAN: This was Muldergate?
ALLISTER SPARKS: This was the Muldergate story, which my newspaper exposed, broke open after two years of investigation. Well, we held meetings. We would, at random, book rooms to go and have our news conferences in various hotels, because we all assumed that the office was bugged. And when this carried on, working on that assumption, I then discovered that my own secretary was a spy. So, even though we were booking these rooms, she was doing the bookings. It didn't help that much. And eventually, I went to engage with one of the people we were pursuing, and we had already exposed him, and he was in hiding. And he was also very angry, because he said that the President, the whole government, knew what he was doing, and they were now hanging him out to dry. So he became our final informant.
And I had to sit for two days in the Baur au Lac Hotel in Zurich, waiting for him to show up. He had fled to Latin America. And then he turned up in France. And he wouldn’t -- I sat there for two days, and he said he would -- I got this message to come and meet him. But as I boarded the plane, I realized that somebody came barging in last, very late into the aircraft and flopped down beside me. And we then landed in Zurich, and I saw him following me. And I leapt in a taxi, and it was almost like one of those old-fashioned movies. I said to the taxi driver, you know, "Lose that chap." And he followed me quite some distance. And it became this very sort of sleazy underworld, but one lived with it and coped with it.
I mean, I think this is still such a shock in the United States, that you, you know, I think you feel that it's all so new to you, the realization of it, but I guess we got used to it. I mean, it's a very unpleasant thing. You feel unclean all the time. And that is why I think, you know, the end of apartheid in South Africa was such a liberating thing. One felt the country -- quite apart from racism, one felt it was being cleansed in so many other ways, too. And, you know, this is why I find it deeply disturbing to see what is happening in the United States today, and everything from detentions without trial to wiretapping to the torture of prisoners, which seems to be blatantly done and obviously condoned from very high quarters. So many of the odious things that I lived with for so long in my country, that poisoned our society, I now see them occurring in the United States, which I've always admired, and it's tarnished my admiration most seriously. It's a country I really have no great wish to visit again.
Commentary 
Legendary South African Journalist Allister Sparks on Wiretapping and Torture, Under Apartheid and Bush
