I think Pierre de Vos mostly gets the better of David Bullard in this exchange, although it’s hard to tell because they’re arguing different things. Here’s De Vos, arguing (correctly) that Bullard’s forced exit from the Sunday Times was not a case of “censorship”, because the Sunday Times is not the South African government:

No one has prohibited Bullard from expressing his opinions. During the apartheid years those who expressed politically “undesirable” views were “banned”, newspapers prohibited from quoting certain individuals and other newspapers harassed or even closed. This has not happened in his case. He is free to say what he thinks and to try and convince any newspaper editor to publish his little missives, or to publish them himself on the Internet. [...] No one has a right to have a column in a newspaper - not even someone with the high self-esteem of Mr Bullard.

And here’s Bullard’s response. He seems to implicitly concede De Vos’ central argument, but claims argues that the Sunday Times should not have fired him because his columns performed a positive social good:

Freedom of speech, as Salman Rushdie once observed, includes the freedom to offend. [...] Learned judge Albie Sachs said in Laugh it Off Promotions CC v SAB International (Finance) BV 2006 that “A society that takes itself too seriously risks bottling up its tensions and treating every example of irreverence as a threat to its existence. Humour is one of the great solvents of democracy… It promotes diversity… It is an elixir of constitutional health”. Whether you have personal issues about the author or simply don’t have much of a sense of humour you cannot deny that “Out to Lunch” was that elixir for fourteen years. It’s banning sends a clear message to the people of this country that the Sunday Times regards its readers as too stupid to be allowed to read such stuff and make up their own minds.

The strange thing about this dispute is that it’s entirely possible for both Bullard and De Vos to be right. It would be perfectly consistent to say that the Sunday Times was both within its rights to fire Bullard, and wrong to actually do so - and I suspect De Vos might even endorse this position. But while the value of Bullard’s columns is a matter of subjective taste, I think De Vos’ argument deserves closer examination.

De Vos implicitly suggests that we can draw a clear dividing line between private publishers and the state. If the state formally interferes in the activities of private publishers - for example, if Parliament were to pass a law saying that no newspaper is allowed to publish David Bullard - this would be censorship, and it would be wrong. However, if private publishers decide not to hire David Bullard, they are simply exercising their own freedom to decide what to publish, and this is fine. To the extent that De Vos is worried about the protecting the autonomy of private publishers against government interference, I share his concerns. However, does it really make sense to draw a sharp public-private distinction in a country where the government is so heavily entangled in the economy?

Consider the following: the government is the largest economic entity in South Africa; it is the country’s largest employer by a huge margin, and its annual spending is equivalent to 25% of the country’s GDP. Government contracts are awarded according to a murky set of criteria, giving officials considerable scope to allocate tenders on the basis of political motives rather than commercial ones. In addition, the ruling party maintains a huge portfolio of business interests that it can pretty much use at its own discretion, and the senior leadership of the ruling party includes some of the country’s wealthiest businessmen. Finally, a significant portion of the country’s news media falls under the umbrella of the SABC and is therefore directly owned by the government.

Given all of this, there are surely many ways for the government to influence who the media hires and fires without legally compelling them to do so (which would in any case be rejected by the Constitutional Court). It can control who appears on the state-run media, and withdraw advertising by its own agencies (or potentially businesses under its control) from critical media outlets. If all else fails, individual members of the ruling party can simply buy out newspapers they don’t like. This is not to suggest that all of these tactics are illegitimate (the Sunday Times arguably has no more right to government advertising than David Bullard has to a column). Nor do I suggest that government influence played a role in this specific case: as far as I can tell, firing Bullard was entirely the decision of the Sunday Times’ own management. However, the idea that the absence of formal censorship means that there is no problem with press freedom is, I think, mistaken.