A check-up on just who TML journalists have been calling from their phones at work caused an outrage, reports Stefaans BrUmmer
TIMES Media Limited — owner of the Sunday Times, Business Day and other titles — this week apologised to reporters after being accused of tactics “reminiscent of the former security branch” in compromising confidential sources.
Reporters said that earlier this month TML Johannesburg switchboard operators, using computer recordings of numbers dialled by reporters, called those numbers in an attempt to check whether they had been private or business calls. Some reporters were billed for “private” calls.
It appears the check was an attempt to cut down on private calls made by employees to combat rising telephone bills, but on Wednesday TML managing director Roy Paulson called Jimmy Beaumont, South African Union of Journalists (SAUJ) branch co- ordinator, to say management conceded it had made a mistake, and assured reporters there would be no repeat.
TML group human resources manager Sian Dennis told the Mail & Guardian: “This is not company policy. We have been made aware of it, and we are investigating it to its fullest extent.”
Reporters were left embarrassed when confidential sources — in one instance at least a parliamentary figure — were quizzed on the nature of conversations they had had with reporters.
The confidentiality of sources is seen as a sacred rule of journalistic ethics. Said Motsomi Mokhine, general secretary of the SAUJ: “Journalists thought this exercise compromised their integrity. To that extent the union is alarmed that management could initiate an excercise like this without first consulting with employees … I think one of the [outcomes] could certainly be that TML would in the long term be compromised, as people would be less willing to go off the record with journalists.”
Mokhine said there was always a danger that information on journalists’ contacts could fall into wrong hands, and that the SAUJ would discuss the TML incident at a national level.
Beaumont said: “We regret that little forethought seems to have been employed in checking up on people in this manner; the tactic would seem to be more reminiscent of the former Security Branch than a responsible newspaper management. In the process, some journalists have been embarrassed and their confidential sources compromised, which is unforgiveable.”
SAUJ members charge management broke an earlier undertaking to record only the first five digits of outgoing calls to protect the identity of reporters’ contacts, and maintain that a voluntary identification of private calls, as is the case in many other companies, would have solved the problem.