Complaint against a Cutting Edge programme which dealt with residents of Khayelithsa 
who dumped human waste at various venues to protest poor service delivery and the portable toilet system currently in use by the City of Cape Town. Complaint that the programme misrepresented the provision of sanitation services in Cape Town by unbalanced reporting, that it misled viewers and caused substantial reputational harm to the City of Cape Town. Complainant also avers that services provided by the City of Cape Town were not compared with other municipalities in South Africa.
Tribunal held that the programme’s aim was not to compare sanitation systems in different areas of the country, but to focus specifically on the situation in Cape Town which was the cause for the protests. For this reason the statistics that the complainant referred to were not relevant for the programme. The aim of the investigative programme was to find out why people would resort to such behaviour, as well as to investigate why residents still go into open fields to relieve themselves.
The complainant also complained that one subtitle was incorrect by implying that the system was not widely accepted.
Tribunal held that in the context of the protests, the number of residents accepting the system is irrelevant since clearly some education about the system’s advantages are still needed. Thus the wording of the subtitle could not be judged to have been an intentional or negligent departure from the facts as it gave reasonable regard to context and importance. Regarding unbalanced reporting, the Tribunal held that decisions regarding whom to interview and for how long, as well as which material to include and which not, remain the prerogative of the producer, that the viewpoints represented in the programme amounted to honest expressions of opinions and that sufficient balance was attained to enable viewers to make up their own minds about the issue.
No contravention of the Code of Conduct was found and the complaint was not upheld.