Say No To Secrecy and Yes to Press Freedom – join the rally against the SECRECY BILL on Saturday Sept 17th in Cape Town

If you don’t have this freedom of the press, then all these little fellows are weaseling around and doing their monkey business and they never get caught.  ~Harold R. Medina

Join me this Saturday for the Right to Know Rally in Cape Town (https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=111889785582542) as we stand up together for our freedoms in a very pivotal moment in South Africa’s modern history! If the Information Bill/Secrecy Bill passes as is, the government will get away with threatening to jail those people who tell the truth about what’s happening in our country – even if it is those in power who are doing wrong and who need to be exposed! We cannot sit idly by and not even attempt to show that we do NOT agree with the ANC leadership’s vision of a press controlled by its government. It’s what the Apartheid Govt did and those days should be history!

Don’t forget to wear red, white and black.

Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won you earn it and win it in every generation” – Coretta Scott King .

When I was studying at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and we would walk into the entrance lobby every day, quotes of Joseph Pulitzer would remind us of the importance of a strong, independent press for any true democracy. Without a press that struggles to tell the truth despite the propaganda machines, democracy is in fact a farce.

Here are some of Pulitzer’s words:
 “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together,” Pulitzer wrote. “An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”  
 —  Joseph Pulitzer
   
  “There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy. Get these things out in the open, describe them, attack them, ridicule them in the press, and sooner or later public opinion will sweep them away. Publicity may not be the only thing that is needed, but it is the one thing without which all other agencies will fail.”
 —  Joseph Pulitzer   

Rally Starts on cnr of Tennant St and Keizersgracht St (outside CPUT) – 10:30am – 1pm

Wear red, white and black!

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