Roll together the Watergate hearings of 1974, the Iran-contra hearings of 1987, and the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings of 1991 and you will have some sense of the excitement South Africans felt in May, when a heretofore closed political process took place in public and on television.

The subject of the hearings was explosive: Who would control the board of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, which controls the only daily television news in the country?

For years, SABC news has openly favored the ruling white minority government of the National party. Only recently has it become somewhat "less uncritical" of President F. W. de Klerk and his party, in the words of Gavin Stewart, who heads the journalism department at Rhodes University in Grahamstown (see "South Africa: Coloring TV," CJR, November/December 1991). Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress have long held that fair elections cannot take place without first reforming SABC's news, because of the corporation's dominant and historically partisan role in past campaigns.

Early this year, the Campaign for Independent Broadcasting, a reform group of media professionals, called for the selection of a new nonpartisan board of governors for the SABC, urging that the process be open and public and supervised by an "eminent" panel headed by two judges who chaired last year's multi-party democracy talks.

But as one of the CIB's leading members, veteran white newspaper editor Raymond Louw, pointed out last March, "The government opposed first the judges, then the eminent persons, and finally the public hearings. Throughout the winter, the government and the ANC negotiated, and in April the government finally yielded -- on the judges, on the eminent persons, and finally on the public hearings.

The negotiations produced a panel of eight judges and lawyers, carefully balanced by race, ideology, and party. Then, after culling applications from hundreds of candidates, the panel released a list of eighty-six finalists for the new twenty-five-member board of governors. The negotiated guidelines required new board members to "have a balanced sense of judgment" and "not have a high political profile of a partisan nature." It was up to the selection panel to apply those criteria in choosing the final twenty-five.

The panel insisted that the questioning of all the candidates should be in public, and on television -- SABC television.

The setting for the hearings was the large high-ceilinged conference room in South Africa's World Trade Centre, which also serves as the site of the country's multi-party democracy negotiations. Each candidate in turn took the seat facing the selection panel. The most dramatic exchanges were those between Judge Ismail Mohammed and Christo Viljoen, SABC's board chairman since 1989.

Considered certain to be included on the new board, Viljoen gave the appearance of a man unaccustomed to being questioned, certainly not in public, and definitely not by the likes of the slender black man who confronted him.

But when it was over, the newspapers said Viljoen had been "humiliated." Under questioning by Justice Mohammed, he conceded that, following his policies, the SABC had refused to cover much of the country's black politics. And he was forced to discuss his membership in the Broederbond, a secret Afrikaner society whose members include many senior officials in government and industry.

TV1, the most popular of SABC's three television networks, carried portions of the hearings -- taped, not live. From the glass office towers of Johannesburg to the squatter camps in black townships, everywhere South Africans watch television and listen to radio, the hearings held the nation in thrall. Tense moments were rendered all the more dramatic by the relentless close-ups of the candidates and the questioners.

"Did you see Viljoen's face?" a black woman asked me the day after the chairman's testimony. "Did you see his expression? The poor man, he's gone."

Well, not quite: On May 21, the panel delivered its list of names to de Klerk -- and Viljoen's name was not on it. A week passed with no statement, and with the incumbent SABC board's term set to expire on Monday, the thirty-first.

Finally, on Monday came the official announcement: de Klerk had decided that the reform had gone too far. In a tense meeting in the president's office onFriday, he had told the selection panel he was rejecting one-third of its choices.

De Klerk complained that some panel selections were pro-ANC, and said one of its choices, veteran newspaper editor Allister Sparks, was ineligible: newspaper experience, he held, was incompatible with serving on the broadcasting board. In place of the panel's choices, de Klerk substituted his own people -- including Christo Viljoen.

SABC BOARD FIASCO was the headline in the Johannesburg Star; that may have been an understatement. The public furor lasted for weeks, and negotiations continued into the summer in an attempt to put the SABC reforms back on track.

Meanwhile, bitterness over the SABC fight spilled over into the main political talks. On July 2, when both Mandela and de Klerk were in Washington and when many South Africans hoped that both men would call for the end of U.S. economic sanctions, Mandela said the sanctions should not be lifted yet. His reason: de Klerk cannot be trusted -- and he cited as an example de Klerk's interference in the SABC reforms.

In a closed meeting on August 4, the board named a compromise chair, Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, a black moderate, and a vice chair, Colin Hickling, one of the seven people de Klerk had forced onto the board in May. The board then announced that it had decided to retain the SABC's long-time c.e.o., Wynand Harmse, together with all of its incumbent white department heads. In short, reform had been stalemated and, as Allistair Sparks observed, de Klerk's interference had been "legitimized."

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