Ed Linington, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 88, was the editor of the Sapa news agency for 20 years and South Africa's press ombudsman for 10 years after that.
He became Sapa's editor in 1972 when the agency was regarded as a conservative part of the mainstream media and even laboured under innuendos that it was government-run.
He continued its tradition, established under his predecessor, David Friedmann, as a flawlessly independent source of accurate, unbiased information that newspapers and other media relied on.
Some were anti-government and some pro-government. His studious neutrality was bound to upset most of them most of the time for very different reasons, and it did.
The pressure he came under from editors and managements was unrelenting and sometimes intense. He responded with wry humour and occasional anger, but never gave an inch.
When the editor of the government-aligned Citizen newspaper, Johnny Johnson, criticised Sapa in his Height Street Diary column, Linington, a man of few but well-chosen words, dropped him a note on the telex wire. If Johnson ever criticised Sapa again he would cut off his Sapa feed permanently, he said. The notoriously irascible Johnson never did.
There was unremitting pressure from the government, too. When Linington insisted on calling MK cadres "insurgents" or "guerrillas", the National Party government of PW Botha was furious and demanded that Sapa's board instruct him to call them "terrorists". However, "insurgents" and "guerrillas" they remained.
His refusal to kowtow to the government or his board was particularly courageous given the continuing and very real threat of government regulation of the media. Linington chaired the Conference of Editors, which was set up in the '70s to fight it.
Linington felt an almost religious dedication during the violent upheavals of the '70s and '80s to get the news out no matter the obstacles.When South African troops invaded Angola in 1975, the government imposed a complete media blackout. Although the rest of the world knew, South Africans did not.
Linington, a lawyer by training, spotted a loophole in the government restrictions imposed on publishers. Arguing that Sapa was not a publisher, but a wholesale distributor of content, he sent out all the news stories Sapa could get on the Angola invasion with an accompanying note advising editors to "consult your lawyer if in doubt".
The stories weren't printed but they were absorbed. The veil of secrecy around the invasion was pierced, and the government was livid.
When the Soweto riots erupted in June 1976, Sapa was largely a content-processing hub and consisted mostly of subeditors. There were no reporters to cover it. Linington immediately understood the magnitude of the story and almost literally yanked subs from their desks in the Johannesburg office and sent them into Soweto.
The copy they filed was used around the world and considerably boosted its image as the independent South African Press Association. This set a precedent for creating its own copy, even if it was studiously neutral and relatively bland.
During the state of emergency in the '80s, Linington sent his reporters every day to fetch from police headquarters in Pretoria an A3-size photocopy of appalling quality of the charge-book in which the police had written in barely legible handwriting the names of all detainees.
Hundreds of names had to be punched in manually from this almost indecipherable photocopy. It was the only source of the names of those detained without trial, which the police had to make available to the press in terms of the legislation.
It was a laborious and thankless task but when his reporters complained, Linington's response was typically brusque and to the point: "It is important that you do it, and you will do it."
It was thanks to him that thousands of desperate families found out what had become of their loved ones, hundreds of them children.
Linington was born in Pietermaritzburg on December 24 1928. His father was a circuit magistrate.
After matriculating at Pretoria Boys' High he went to Rhodes University, where he graduated with a BA law degree in 1949.
He worked on the Bulawayo Chronicle, the Northern News in Ndola, Zambia, and The Herald in Salisbury (Harare).He joined Sapa in 1955, covered the upheavals in Malawi, the release from detention of Dr Hastings Banda, who became the first president of Malawi in 1966, the independence of the Belgian Congo, the declaration of Katanga's independence by Moise Tshombe and subsequent chaos.
He covered the last four months of the treason trial in the Old Synagogue, Pretoria, in 1960, before joining the Sapa team in parliament. In 1962 he became Sapa's London bureau chief.
He covered the negotiations that led to the break-up of the Central African Federation, Ian Smith's unilateral declaration of independence, the birth of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London, the disruptions of South African sports tours and the South West Africa mandate case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which ended in 1966 in South Africa's favour.
While covering the 1970 summit of non-aligned nations in Zambia, he was thrown into Lusaka Remand Prison with other journalists from the world's leading news agencies for a few days after they complained that the Yugoslav news agency had been allocated most of the telex machines. 
He retired from Sapa in 1992 and became the press ombudsman.
When the tsunami hit Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka in 2004, killing some 230,000 people, he had to rule on complaints that the pictures newspapers were publishing were too horrific.
True to form, he defended their decision to publish because he said it was important to show the true horror of the disaster and its aftermath.
Linington is survived by his wife Vivien and seven children.
1928-2017..