A Cape Town radio listener has taken on city radio station 567 Cape Talk, accusing it of biased and discriminatory reporting on Islam.

The Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa this week held a hearing in Cape Town under chairperson Kobus van Rooyen to deal with the complaint by Nabeweya Malick.

Malick has been inundating 567 Cape Talk with e-mails since August concerning its early morning reports on the Middle East, particularly by the station's Washington correspondent, Connie Lawn.

"I complained to them about the way in which they have been reporting on conflicts in the world. I suspect that Cape Talk leans towards news trends more in favour of the White House view," she said.

'The reports generated the perception that Muslims were innately hateful'

Malick said she was upset by what she called Lawn's "biased reporting" that contained "anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic sentiment".

"To get a balance they could interview someone in the Middle East, for example, to give a balanced view," she said.

After endless letters of complaint yielded no replies, Malick laid a complaint with the Broadcasting Complaints Commission in March.

"I can't understand why they (Cape Talk) did not respond to the emails," she said.

Lydia Jordaan of the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa said the organisation expected stations to respond to complaints

and have a record of how each was handled.

She said there was no time limit in the licence agreement for the radio station to respond.

"They are expected to respond to complaints and if they do not, the complainant should complain to us and we will take the matter up with the station," she said.

Following her complaint with the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, Malick said Lawn's reports had become more toned down and "censored".

Malick said she was contacted by Cape Talk management and asked to withdraw her complaint because the matter had been addressed.

"I said that I would not be able to do that because my complaint was not about how things are, but how they were. I mean, there were producers who were listening to this correspondent every morning and allowed it to continue. If it had not been for my complaint they would not have done anything, which means that they didn't see anything wrong with it. It was against Islam and Muslims.

"I feel many of the reports generated the perception that Muslims were innately hateful.

"I wanted to let Cape Talk know it may be acceptable to report like this to Muslims elsewhere, but in South Africa Muslims won't take this."

She urged other listeners and viewers to complain about things that they felt were unfairly treated in the media. "We cannot leave it up to the media to be objective," she said.

Pheladi Gwangwa, regulatory affairs manager at Cape Talk, attended the hearing this week and confirmed that Malick had accused the station of unfair and biased reporting.

Gwangwa said Lawn was a White House correspondent on a feature in the morning show called USReport.

"The aim of the show is to give South African listeners the prevailing opinion in America."

Gwangwa said the station did not reply to Malick's complaints because it was inundated with callers and e-mails about the show.

"What we do is we keep tabs on the complaints and look for trends, and we respond to that," she said.

She said the station picked up an increasing number of complaints about Lawn soon after the start of the war in Iraq.

"We contacted Connie and made her understand that Cape Talk had a large Muslim listenership and it had to be sensitive to them."

Gwangwa said Lawn had toned down but conceded her views did lean towards the White House.

The Broadcasting Complaints Commission confirmed that a hearing into Malick's complaints was held this week. An outcome was expected after July 19, when Van Rooyen returned from leave.

Iqbal Jassat of the Media Review Network, an advocacy group based in Pretoria that monitors Islamophobia in the media, told Weekend Argus: "Islamophobia is the fear aroused about Islam or the deliberate spread of fear about Islam."

In a statement last year regarding an on-air interview on Cape Talk, the group said it was "appalled by the outrageous Islamophobic remarks" by Connie Lawn when she attacked American Muslims describing them as "ungrateful and unpatriotic," he said.

"Anti-Muslim prejudices, covered by correspondents who obviously have an axe to grind, expose themselves as individuals who bring journalistic ethics into disrepute.

"This should not be tolerated by South African media," he said.

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