Qwelane told the TRC's hearing into the role of the media in the apartheid years all the major newspaper houses in South Africa had supported the state of emergency and media owners had blood on their hands.
"I want to charge all the mainstream newspapers - English and Afrikaans - with collusion with apartheid and having a hand, directly or indirectly, in the subsequent murder of tens of thousands of black people by the apartheid army and police. I'm not off my rocker," he said.
"Having got legitimacy for his evil designs, Botha unleased the emergency and a reign of unprecedented terror on our people." Qwelane said black reporters were routinely and regularly discriminated against by their newspaper bosses.
He said the mainstream newspapers violated the public's basic human rights by denying them information on apartheid. The lack of training was often used as an excuse to deny black journalists promotion opportunites, Qwelane said.
News was segregated along racial lines by the distribution of Extra or African editions by major newspapers to the black population. "Conventional newsroom wisdom then was that blacks loved to read about sex, soccer and crime."
While the front and back pages were changed, the inner pages were deviod of any of the routine financial and business news, he said.
"The existence of separate, apartheid-style newspapers necessitated the demarcation of newsrooms on racial lines, and the staffing of the segregated newsrooms was also on racial lines." Qwelane said news editors would routinely ask of township or political stories: "Is the story of white interest?"
During his time at the Sunday Starin the 1980s he was ordered by the editor to stop working on a story about a black man who stabbed his wife, then hanged himself and left their seven children orphaned, in favour of a story about a truckload of sheep stuck in the rain when the truck broke down near Midrand.
Both stories were used (the sheep story more prominently) and the murder/suicide only on page two of the African edition.
"Such treatment of news.... constitutes a violation of people's rights to be informed."
He said while newspaper groups opposed apartheid pass legislation in their editorial pages, they practised it against their own staff.
He was not paid for three months by The Star newspaper because the assistant general manager at the time would not issue him with his salary unless he registered at the pass office.
Eventually the Africa edition news editor demanded he be paid. Pay scales were blatantly disciminatory, with black and white journalists doing the same job being paid vastly differently salaries.
Black staff were forced to sit in a black area of the newsroom, and eat in a separate canteen with prison-like steel crockery and cutlery, while their white colleagues ate off porcelain.
Toilets were also segregated, and the separate canteens issue was resolved by the opening of a third "international" canteen.
Referring to the agreement with Botha, Qwelane said: "Was this pact not a tacit violation of our human rights? Did the media owners, by their endorsment of Botha's madness, not help the delay of our day of liberation?"
He said, however, English-language newspapers should be applauded for some of their reportage, inter alia the coverage of the inhumane conditions in SA prisons, the Info scandal, the unmasking of the CCB and Vlakplaas.
Leading black editor Thami Mazwai echoed Qwelane's sentiments, detailing descriptions of further apartheid newsroom and employment discrimination.
He said he was offered to have two days' wages or leave docked by former Rand Daily Mail editor Allister Sparks when Mazwai was detained for taking part in a protest march.
He said when he worked at the World newspaper, which was a "Bantu" edition of the Star, black journalists were not allowed to write on politics as a "matter of law" and had to get them from The Star.
Both men said the antagonism of reporters in the violence-torn East Rand and KwaZulu-Natal in the 1980s may have been a result of self-censorship of the newspapers.
"We were forced to write the sanitised version of the truth,"
Qwelane said newspapers would not print reporters' eye-witness accounts but used the official, sanitised version. Activists monitored the media as much as the state's security apparatus had, and reporters were caught between "a rock and a hard place".
Allegations of collusion were strenously denied by Times Media Limited's deputy chief operating officer Neil Jacobson during the nespaper group's submission later on Wednesday.
He said the prosecution of reporters was proof they had not colluded. "We too were victims of apartheid, in a sense," he said. He admitted discrimination existed and apologised, but said he did not believe it was company policy.