‘South Africa’--When?

Shocking!

That’s the word for KCET’s bonehead decision to drop “South Africa Now,” the unique and essential series whose perspective and depth of coverage concerning southern Africa is unavailable elsewhere on television.

Whereas the commercial networks report on South Africa and its slowly loosening bonds of apartheid only sporadically, the independently produced “South Africa Now” has been a clear, steady voice on 80 PBS stations.

Now it appears that voice has been stilled in Los Angeles as it has been in Boston, where giant PBS station WGBH joined influential KCET in canceling this weekly newsmagazine with a distinctly black perspective.

Is its keyhole of light too harsh? Is this gutsy little half hour with a record of yanking skeletons from the white South African government’s closet just too tough for some of the PBS family to handle? Are its charges that security police and right-wing death squads are unseen fingers manipulating black-on-black violence in South African townships just too bold?

Even more significantly, with these cancellations of “South Africa Now,” are we witnessing more of the intellectual graying and sterilization of PBS, an institution meant to challenge and stimulate America with diversity and fresh ideas, not to copy the timidity of commercial TV? It’s something to consider.

The “South Africa Now” time slot here--9 a.m. Sunday--was not prime time, but it was better than no time at all. KCET cites journalistic, not ideological, reasons for canceling the series, with Stephen Kulczycki, senior vice president and station manager, charging it with a bias toward the African National Congress (ANC). That’s denied by New York-based Globalvision, which produces “South Africa Now.”

But, you know, Kulczycki may be right in a sense. At the very least, “South Africa Now” is a program with a point of view. Unlike the preponderance of reporting on the region, it views not only the nation of South Africa, but also the whole of southern Africa through black eyes.

Yet it offers a brand of reporting that falls well short of advocacy and well within the bounds of legitimate and responsible journalism on a program that does not purport to be a traditional newscast. This is not “The CBS Evening News With Dan Rather,” after all. It’s a scrappy, low-budget program that, despite raw production quality, achieves unique and dramatic results with the resources available to it.

Meanwhile, are there unseen fingers manipulating KCET?

Although Kulczycki says KCET’s decision was made independently, it follows a period of intense lobbying by the Los Angeles-based conservative media watchdog, the Committee on Media Integrity. The group’s chairman, David Horowitz, has labeled the program “party-line propaganda” and repeatedly called for its cancellation.

Although giving lip service to balance, Horowitz defines propaganda, apparently, as anything that doesn’t match his party line.

He has offered “South Africa Now” as an example of KCET’s being “skewed way over to the left.” Presumably, he is referring also to the weekly presence on KCET of those rabid Marxists William F. Buckley Jr. (“Firing Line”), John McLaughlin (“One on One”) and Morton Kondracke (“American Interests”), and those bright pinkos “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” “Washington Week in Review” and “Wall Street Week.”

Actually, these programs range ideologically from far right to just right of center, and there’s been no call from Horowitz and his group to balance them . Yet in a letter to Kulczycki last month, Horowitz proposed that the station, among other things, either cancel “South Africa Now” or label it “commentary” and “balance” it with a South Africa program “from the right.”

Yes, that’s what KCET needs, more about that great bastion of liberalism, South Africa, “from the right.”

Do you believe in coincidence? Well, Horowitz, after initially claiming victory in the “South Africa Now” cancellation at KCET, now vigorously denies having “swayed” the station. Even if you believe this belated disclaimer, the fact remains, based on the furor over its decision, that public station KCET is totally out of touch with a segment of the public it purports to serve.

Horowitz also denies having influenced the decision at WGBH. Dan Everett, director of broadcasting there, was quoted as saying that the station dropped “South Africa Now” only because “there is more access now and more sources of information.”

Not on the nightly newscasts aired by the Big Three networks.

According to the TV monitoring service U.S. Newswire, ABC, CBS and NBC aired only a combined 27 stories on South Africa from Aug. 8 through Oct. 9--about a story a week per network. And most of these were “tell” stories--headlines read by an anchor without accompanying pictures.

In one 2 1/2-week span during this period, moreover, there were no South Africa stories on any of the networks.

During much of this time, the world’s media were preoccupied with events in the Persian Gulf. Even in calmer times, however, a 22-minute newscast yields little room for adequate reporting of global events, meaning that South Africa gets spotty coverage, at best. The rare PBS documentary on South Africa--”Frontline” has one coming up--hardly fills the void.

And the cancellations of “South Africa Now” only deepen it.

“I think it’s outrageous,” said Jeff Cohen, who heads Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal, self-titled “progressive” media watchdog organization based in New York. “I didn’t think we’d be fighting this battle again. Public TV is supposed to be programming where you have points of view, but if the points of view are progressive or anti-racist, they always have to jump higher hurdles. In a sense, this is a declaration of war.”

“South Africa Now” gets another strong endorsement from Marc N. Weiss, executive producer of “P.O.V.,” a PBS documentary series that also has come under attack from Horowitz for lacking “balance.”

“It (‘South Africa Now’) does an extraordinary job,” Weiss said. “Week after week, they surface stories that the networks pretend they can’t get. If they do have a point of view, the only difference between them and the networks is the networks don’t admit they have a point of view.”

Actually, Weiss openly acknowledged the “left-of-center” tilt of those issue-oriented films aired by “P.O.V.,” and has sought to change that. The series--its title is the acronym for point of view --presents independently produced nonfiction films, receiving up to 400 submissions a year of which 15 or 16 get on the air.

“But we just do not get any from conservative filmmakers,” said Weiss, who prior to this season put out a press release soliciting films that express “conservative perspectives.” Actually, there have been a handful submitted in the last 3 years, but these were rejected, Weiss said, either because they were not independently produced or were not of sufficient quality.

“South Africa Now” has quality . . . and value. What it hasn’t anymore, much to the city’s loss, is a home on KCET.