Muldergate: Covert Efforts to Influence Opinion

Freedom of speech in the West means “the right to lie, deceive, and distort,” the South African minister of foreign affairs, R. F. Botha, told a nationwide television audience in March 1983.1 Botha was reacting to an article in Newsweek magazine that argued that blacks still suffered ill treatment in South Africa despite the government’s proposed constitutional reforms. The article, said Botha, was “dripping with enmity and hate.” Others took up the cry. The Afrikaans Sunday paper Rapport complained that the article was a “reprehensible and deliberate denigration of efforts to build a better South Africa … part of a campaign that has been waged in so many different ways for so many years.” The Johannesburg daily, The Citizen, characterized the Newsweek article as “mischievous, one-sided and written to detract from the genuine reform plans of the government.”2 What Botha and these newspapers chose to ignore was that the Nationalist government itself had, just several years before, engaged in lies, deception, and distortion to promote its policies at home and abroad. And the sanctimonious Citizen was one product of that effort.