Journalists Defy Laws to Expand All the News That’s Legal to Print

Charles Spencer and his wife, Victoria Lockwood, put their messy divorce to rest Wednesday, reaching agreement behind closed doors to end their eight-year marriage.

The confidential settlement between the late Princess Diana’s brother and sister-in-law, who have been living in South Africa since last year, followed a week of sensational coverage focusing on Spencer’s alleged extramarital affairs.

But as the media feeding frenzy here surrounding the breakup abates, free-speech advocates are looking past the gossipy headlines--and the hard feelings between many journalists and the man who blames the Fourth Estate for his sister’s death--at the divorce case’s broader implications for media freedoms in post-apartheid South Africa.

Extensive coverage of the divorce proceedings, particularly by two newspapers in Cape Town, where the Spencers live, came despite an 18-year-old South African statute barring publication of all but the most basic details of divorce cases. In only one other instance--last year’s divorce of President Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela--have South African media wholesale ignored the restrictions.

“We can’t choose our battles; we take them as they arise,” said Moegsien Williams, editor of the Cape Argus, which Spencer sued to block coverage of the divorce hearings--a suit he later dropped. “We deliberately breached the law of the country. . . . We need to test the frontiers of our new constitution.”

The 1979 divorce law was passed by the former white minority regime to shield its leaders from potentially embarrassing disclosures about their extramarital affairs, according to the South African Freedom of Expression Institute.

The law is among three dozen or so holdover statutes from the apartheid era that continue to muzzle the media, said Raymond Louw, the institute’s deputy chairman and a veteran South African journalist.

“We have been battling since 1990--first with the previous government and then with the present government--to have 30 or 40 laws passed by the old regime removed from the statute books or amended,” Louw said. “They have no place in a democratic society.”

The disputed laws range from restrictions on disclosures about petroleum products (used to cloak the sale of oil to South Africa by countries friendly to the apartheid regime) to a ban on publishing information about South African troop movements (invoked in the past to conceal military forays into neighboring countries).

Although most of the statutes appear to violate speech freedoms guaranteed by the new constitution enacted in February, they have yet to be tested in the courts. Even the divorce law remains officially unchallenged after Spencer withdrew his injunction request. The Mandelas did not seek to block court coverage of their split.

As a sign of the continuing uncertainty, the South African Press Assn. news service prefaces its divorce-related dispatches with an advisory to South African subscribers “to consult their legal advisors,” a warning common under apartheid. Even the trailblazing Cape Town newspapers stopped writing about the Spencer proceedings for two days after Spencer sought the injunction.

Nonetheless, Williams of the Cape Argus described the showdown over the divorce law--and Spencer’s ultimate retreat--as “an important half-step” in securing greater media freedoms in a society still testing the parameters of its new democracy.

But some journalists and media experts, while defending the public’s right to know, say South African media have seized upon the freedom-of-speech issue in the Spencer case more out of prurience than principle.

“I am not sure that this isn’t an ethical question rather than a legal one,” said Rhodes University journalism professor Guy Berger.