Jon Qwelane
Right to Reply
The trouble with the Mail & Guardian’s editor and his small coterie of executives is their apparent obsession with the fallacy that they hold copyright on what is true and correct.
Pontificating from their lofty ivory tower, they seem to have forgotten (or actually never even knew) two simple points: there is no substitute for truth, and one cannot, however hard you may try, short-circuit the truth.
The M&G has, over the years, come to believe that the means it pursues justify the end it seeks to achieve; that is patent nonsense on the part of the paper, and a very dangerous course to follow.
The messianic zeal of the M&G, for example, led it a few years ago to break the law in the pursuit of its brand of cavalier journalism. The paper resorted to shameful criminal tactics by illegally entering someone’s premises to place gadgets of espionage in his premises.
That the target was a former Civil Co- operation Bureau (CCB) operative who may himself have employed illegal methods against others was in itself no licence or justification for the M&G to act criminally, however “noble” it believed its cause to have been.
This underscores the argument I have followed all along, namely, that journalists and their media are not above the law and are no special breed deserving of any special exemptions.
Unfortunately, the pomposity of the editor of the M&G evidently does not allow him, unlike the rest of us in journalism, to “worship at the shrine of unblemished truth” because such “fundamentalist” practices are too “simplistic” and certainly not for his self-important person. It would do the M&G editor a world of good to check his facts before rushing into print like a mad bull. It would certainly save him a lot of trouble, not to mention tens of thousands of rands in settlement of defamation law suits.
Had he checked with me before writing his editorial last week, he would have known better than to claim falsely that I had not checked “a single fact” but had “clearly” relied on one interested source in the Hlengiwe Mkhize story.
As it happens – and the editor could have established this through one telephone call – I am in possession of every scrap of paper regarding that matter. I have photocopies of his reporter’s notes, the changing story of the paper’s sources, the letters the M&G and its lawyers wrote to Mkhize, her lawyers’ replies to the paper and its former editor Anton Harber, every cheque and bank statement relating to Mkhize’s organisation – the lot. And if the M&G editor wants to prove what I am saying, he is welcome to the two bulging files.
I am mentioning this merely to demonstrate the unnecessarily vexatious nature of last weekend’s editorial, which desperately avoided my arguments while purporting to refute them. The M&G cannot defame people, whatever their station, and then cry foul and want laws to be changed to suit its yellow journalism where the paper fails to prove its defamatory allegations.
(By the way the defamatory article on Mkhize in the April 26 to May 2 1996 edition gave rise to an equally defamatory letter published in the May 10 to 16 edition. Those two, for the purpose of the suit, were “articles” and Mkhize demanded reparation for your paper’s initial defamatory article and the defamatory letter it spawned.)
On August 5 1996 Harber wrote to T Gordon-Grant, representing Mkhize: “I am sorry for the delay in replying … We would be happy to publish a full in-depth interview with your client to be given reasonable prominence in our paper.” And was such undertaking honoured? No.
What was inaccurate, then, in what I said? Nothing. In any case, as Mkhize’s lawyer wrote back to Harber: “You will note … our client required the publication of an article to be approved by our client with equal prominence to the prior article, as well as a retraction and unequivocal and unreserved apology.”
So much for your assertion that I rely on one interested source without bothering to check a single one of my facts. And there is nothing fundamentalist at all in the journalistic position I am adopting; the essence of good journalism is accuracy, honesty, fairness and balance.
Abide by those tenets and you will not be sued again and again – successfully, as it turns out. You will also not have to whine that laws must be amended to suit your “journalism” which has no regard for those tenets of the craft.
Your selective quoting is as terrible as your logic: you still manage to get wrong what you claim to have read. I wrote that in the United States and Britain legal and public opinion is divided on cavalier journalism. In other words, divided on precisely your type of “journalism” which has scant regard for the facts and the law – hence the example of Princess Diana’s death, which has been blamed, as I stated very clearly and unambiguously, on the “freedom” of a press which completely violated her right to privacy.
And it is simply not clever to mislead the reading public by stating that the defamatory article on Mkhize was due to pressures of deadlines leading to “unintentional errors, which is what happened in the [case of Mkhize]”.
I am willing to prove this last charge. I will continue to “worship noisily at the shrine of unblemished truth” if in some way that will stop cavalier journalism becoming a norm by default.
Jon Qwelane is a columnist, broadcaster, editor and publisher
n The editor replies: We have published Qwelane’s tirade in full, because we believe that the central issue at stake in this debate is one which could have repercussions for South Africa lasting well beyond the working lives of even the youngest members of our staff.
Unfortunately Qwelane – whose attacks on the M&G smack of a grudge, motivated perhaps by the argument “they must have done something wrong, they’re liberal aren’t they?” – has difficulty keeping his eye on the ball.
Having tried, in a vague way, to lump us with joint responsibility for Princess Di’s death in a French traffic accident, he now denounces us for “criminality” in having tried to place under electronic surveillance a commander of the CCB.
That decision was taken by a previous editor of the M&G, for whom I cannot speak. But when one considers the circumstances of the time – that this country was in a state of (undeclared) war, that the CCB was a criminal operation sponsored by a criminally responsible government and that it was endeavouring to murder members of this newspaper’s staff, among a multitude of others – we can only applaud Harber for his commitment to high principle, courage, intuition, foresight and general sagacity.
The central issue here, however, is that of libel and we fail to see how the above or Qwelane’s attempted point-scoring on questions of accuracy, relates to it. (No matter how Qwelane twists it, our Mkhize retraction related to the headline, not to the original article, which was well-researched, balanced and accurate.)
A starting point of our argument was that we are all guilty of errors – and we demonstrated how this was true of even such a self-proclaimed paragon of journalistic virtue as Qwelane. But, we argued, this needed to be seen in context where press freedom was concerned.
Perhaps Qwelane would be helped by a limited analogy. The medical profession is notorious for its mistakes (despite its propensity to bury them). But it is recognised in law that, where they are committed in good faith, no burden of responsibility is attached to the doctor.
A Qwelane might protest: “There is no substitute for getting it right” and demand that the doctor be punished and the patient recompensed. But society recognises that, even where the doctor’s blunder leads to loss of life, such a fundamentalist approach would hopelessly compromise the medical services.
In the same way, we would argue, a fundamentalist approach to accuracy compromises public debate. And the danger of that should be self-evident to a society with a recent history such as ours. We would go on to argue (leaving the metaphor behind) that such public debate is of particular relevance where the reputations and actions of public officials are concerned.
For that reason we would argue – along with the US Supreme Court, among other jurisdictions – that they should be stripped of all rights of recompense for libel, except perhaps where malice can be proven.
Simplistic arguments such as Qwelane’s can be blamed for the failure of the public to appreciate the way in which the libel laws are used as instruments of censorship. The famous thalidomide case involving the London Sunday Times is the most classic example, where a pharmaceutical group used laws of libel to cover up one of the great medical scandals of our time.
The Inkatha Freedom Party tried it on us just last week, applying to the Natal High Court for an interdict aimed at gagging us not only on a specific story – on a scheme to siphon money from provincial government into party coffers – but any future “defamatory matter”. Judge Hillary Squires, citing rights to freedom of expression guaranteed by our new Constitution – and complimenting us on the balance of our report – ruled for the M&G with costs.
The battle for freedom of expression in South Africa is being fought almost on a daily basis. Again last week we won almost complete validation by the Press Ombudsman, EHLinington, of our decision to publish the Marthinus van Schalkwyk smear story (in the face, it might be said, of sneering denunciations of us by the Independent Group, which has been providing Qwelane with the platform for his attacks on us). Linington’s finding is published in this edition.
And we look forward, with relish, to seeing Emmanuel Shaw II enter the witness box in support of his bid to shut us down with a R7-million libel suit … assuming, of course, that his lawyers will have better luck than heretofore in locating their client.
“There is no substitute for the truth,” thunders Qwelane. At risk of sounding trite, we would observe that there is one. It is silence.