There’s an old saying that most journalism students encounter early and often: if your mother says she loves you, check it out.
The idea is that reporters need to be very cautious about accepting what people tell them and should always look for evidence to corroborate even the most innocuous statement.
At a recent discussion on sourcing at the Mail & Guardian, I introduced the Vicar Scale, based on the idea that if the vicar says the Sunday service will be at 10am, the statement has very high credibility, scoring the maximum 10 on the scale. That’s partly because the vicar is trustworthy and partly because the service is always at that time.
A statement from the ANC spokesperson saying there are no divisions in the party would score a more modest two on the Vicar Scale.
And so we can use the scale to ”score” the credibility of assertions. Journalists often have to work at pushing a statement high enough up the scale to make it publishable, looking for several independent sources, a paper trail, circumstantial evidence and so on.
That old journalistic favourite, the anonymous source, does not help much with credibility.
Make no mistake, there are situations where a source is quite justified in expecting anonymity. Despite legal protection, whistleblowers can suffer real harm, as Dr Nokuzola Ntshona found. She was dismissed from her post as hospital manager after speaking out on conditions at East London’s Frere Hospital.
The problem is that people standing in the shadows can say what they like. Editor Ferial Haffajee speaks of ”the power of anonymity”. An anonymous tip-off is not necessarily the scoop of the year — it can just as easily be a lie, used to damage an enemy of some kind.
Targeted leaks were part of the arsenal of the rival ANC camps in the bitter campaigning that preceded the ANC’s Polokwane conference. Too many newspapers allowed themselves to be used in this way, suffering serious damage to their credibility as a result and harming the media as a whole.
”Leading up to the Polokwane conference I received information, deep intelligence information about ANC president Jacob Zuma for example,” says Haffajee. ”It was dangerous, damaging stuff which we chose not to run. So you can be easily manipulated. And when the stakes are as high as they are now, it happens very easily.”
At the same time it would be impossible to report on the shifts and struggles under way within the ANC without questioning people who are prepared to speak about what is going on but who cannot do so on the record.
Reporting corruption is another area where newspapers end up relying on anonymous sources. Both these are particular strengths for the M&G, which has led to some detailed thinking about the issue.
”I became extremely uncomfortable with the anonymous sources just romping across our pages at the breadth and depth that they were,” says Haffajee.
In discussion, staff identified additional ways to reduce the risk of being manipulated.
For one thing, readers can expect the paper’s journalists to give careful consideration to whether the source is likely to know what he or she is talking about.
I have seen stories saying something such as: ”The chief executive has fallen out with the board, says a staff member.”
Well, I ask myself, how would they know? It sounds much more like the kind of corridor gossip that is rife in big organisations.
Authority comes from having a position in an organisation or, better still, having first-hand knowledge.
Sources need to have seen the document under discussion, for instance, or attended the relevant meeting.
The paper also looks for three sources on major stories. The more controversial a claim is, the more people need to confirm it — and they need to be independent of one another. Getting three friends to repeat the same story is not good enough.
With regard to anonymous sources, journalists are expected to try to ”push people on to the record”, persuade them to put their names to at least part of their claims. Anonymity should not be granted as a matter of course, but only when the newspaper is persuaded the source has a good reason for needing it.
And readers can expect to be given some indication of where the person is situated with regard to the organisation or the controversy.
So ”an ANC branch official in Port Elizabeth” is better than ”an ANC source”. I think that the empty old phrase ”an informed source” has long disappeared from the newspaper.
In the end, though, even the most intense investigation may not deliver enough solid sourcing to stand up. Then, says Haffajee, the M&G will walk away from it, no matter how dramatic or credible it seems.