A steel-frame company has failed in its bid to prevent e.tv from broadcasting its clients’ damning complaints.
SM Structures hauled Devi Govender, who hosts the consumer affairs programme The Devi Show, and e.tv before the high court in Johannesburg, which delivered the judgment on Friday.
The company, which specialises in large steel-frame structures including warehouses and factories, sought an “urgent and final relief restraining” Govender and e.tv from “publishing and broadcasting” material defaming it. The programme, which, according to the judgment, will detail the clients’ dissatisfaction, is scheduled to be broadcast on Sunday.
A grievance by one of SM Structures’ clients on the consumer complaints website Hello Peter sparked the debacle. The client complained the company “performed substandard work” on the structure her company contracted to erect.
“She suggests that SM Structures was both late in performing the work and that the work, when it was complete, was of an unacceptably low quality,” the judgment reads.
The company denied the allegation but the client was “by no means the only person dissatisfied with work SM Structures had done for them”.
The broadcaster provided the court with photographs of crumbling buildings it was “told show SM Structures’ shoddy work”. Govender also interviewed two other disgruntled clients.
Govender asked SM Structures’ bosses for an interview to get the company’s views on the complaints. The company’s lawyers gave Govender a 19-page response to her questions, but SM Structures “declined to make anyone available to be interviewed”.
“It also made clear that its written answers to The Devi Show’s questions could not be used in the show, unless its prior consent was obtained,” the judgment reads.
The lawyers told the broadcaster that a “broadcast featuring the three complainants on which The Devi Show submitted questions would be defamatory and unlawful. An interdict application was threatened, eventually launched, and was ultimately enrolled ...”
But the court said the company “declined to set out the defamatory statements that it wishes to restrain in its founding affidavit. That was unfortunate.
“It is, in my view, clear from the facts of this case that SM Structures cannot reasonably apprehend that it is about to be unlawfully defamed,” the judgment reads.
“e.tv has done more than enough to establish that the broadcast it intends to put out will constitute fair comment on SM Structures’ business practices and the complaints made about them, even if the broadcast contains some prima facie defamatory material.
“A business that offers goods and services to the general public must expect, at some point, to be criticised — with or without justification — for the quality of the goods and services it has provided.
“Where that criticism is not in itself defamatory, false and injurious or otherwise unlawful, and is to be published by a third party, the business faces a choice. That choice is either to ask the third party publisher to present, fairly and in context, the business’s own take on the complaints featured, or to eschew the publication completely.”
The court dismissed the application and slapped SM Structures with legal costs.
“Whatever else may be said of our broadcast media, it is clearly entitled not to be held to ransom in this way,” the judgment reads.
“SM Structures has established neither a clear right to the relief its seeks, nor a reasonable apprehension of harm.”
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