ABSTRACT
Cape Town's Winters can be awful, with a mix of pelting rain and winds so fierce that motorists and pedestrians alike move with caution. The grayness intensifies the cold, producing a miserable grimness one never sees in the tourist material touting what is also one of the world's most exquisitely beautiful cities. The bleakness of a Cape Town winter symbolizes the political climate generated from the parliament buildings located in the heart of the city. The political changes of the early 1990s were as encouraging a step toward openness and freedom as South African journalists had seen in more than a generation. In 1979, Joel Mervis, former editor of the Sunday Times, presented the following assessment of press freedom in South Africa. An increasing politicization of huge numbers of South Africans, coupled with political unrest throughout the decade, led to a hunger for information among many allied to the Mass Democratic Movemen.
