This week the Mail & Guardian carries an apology to Leigh Day & Company over a report in our last edition on the financial award to asbestos miners formerly employed by Cape plc. Our report contained errors, and our policy is not to conceal or to defend our mistakes. Rather, our view is that it is best that we admit to mistakes, apologise appropriately for them, and do our best to rectify them.
While mistakes occur in any endeavour, journalism is particularly prone to them. A major reason is the mass of information journalism transmits and the rapidity with which it does so. In the case of the M&G, however, we have many more law suits brought against us than we make serious mistakes. The reason is that we tackle the shortcomings and sins of the rich or powerful. And these are the people who, irrespective of the accuracy of what we have said, have the resources to seek to shut us up — or even to shut us down — by means of legal action and its prohibitive costs.
This is a category into which falls the threat of legal action against us from Unisa vice-chancellor Barney Pityana. If Pityana is silly enough to pursue a court action, he will, of course, enjoy the benefit of having taxpayers meet his legal bills. But, in Pityana’s case, we will not retract or apologise — unless a court orders us to do so. We will defend to the last ditch our story, and the integrity of David Macfarlane, our education reporter who wrote it.
Why do we take this uncompromising view? Primarily because of our confidence in our facts. But there is a significant secondary reason. Pityana was sent 25 written questions on every aspect of our report two days, and in some cases three days, before we published. We have still not received a set of answers to our questions. This made it impossible for us to record his version, or to amend (or even drop) our story in the light of any facts he might have presented.
Pityana has since apparently become aware of the legal difficulty caused by his silence. At his press conference this week, he claimed to have replied to our questions by asking for further details. What he did not say — and what Unisa officials have now confirmed in writing — is that his request for further details was faxed to us only after we had published. So much for the “world-renowned integrity” of which Pityana boasted this week.
Nor were Pityana’s attempts to present himself as an injured saint strengthened by his behaviour at his press conference. He launched a disgraceful personal attack on our reporter. Macfarlane sat in silence among his colleagues as he was vilified as a racist, a fraud and an anti-transformation conspirator who resembled the security police of old. Such bully-boy tactics put Pityana in a contemptible light. Macfarlane and the M&G are considering their own legal options over this.
As he invariably does, Pityana is not fighting this battle on the facts, but by crying race. He has offered no convincing rebuttal of the heart of our story, which is that millions of rands of taxpayers’ money have been spent on a university mansion for his personal use. Instead he has sidetracked the issue, and tried to rally black opinion behind him, by loudly claiming that Macfarlane and the M&G are racists plotting to derail transformation at Unisa. Whenever Pityana’s actions are questioned, his reflex is to trot out the same old racism canard.
Underlying Pityana’s behaviour is the same assumption that underpinned the Human Rights Commission’s notorious probe into media racism, Pityana’s baby. It is that the dignity (read immunity from harsh criticism) of black public figures is sacrosanct and that white critics should keep their traps shut.
The media response to Pityana’s antics has been instructive. The Sunday Independent‘s Xolela Mangcu did the racial solidarity number in a column probably unique in the annals of world journalism. Writers in newspapers do not call for another publication to be sued; Mangcu did.
But not all black journalists lined up behind Pityana, as they largely did during the Human Rights Commission inquiry. Apparently unimpressed with the version provided by Pityana or his minions, City Press decided not to take sides in his quarrel with the M&G.
City Press, a black-run and largely black-staffed paper, has become an important centre of independent journalism in South Africa. Its professional response must be contrasted with the vacuous maunderings of one white editor who contrived to suggest that Pityana could not possibly have done wrong.
Newspapers like City Press are the strongest argument for the racial transformation of the South African media. It is confident and independently minded black journalists we need, not senior whites who look anxiously over their shoulders at their black bosses, or tortured white liberals desperate to atone for the pigmentation of their skin.