Following a hearing before the Press Ombudsman in Johannesburg on February 5, the Mail & Guardian is required to publish the following: The Mail & Guardian published in its November 10 to 16 issue a report which accused the Hartbeespoort Local Council of hijacking the tourist town by setting up a private company, owned by the eight white councillors, to take over profitable municipal services ahead of the December local elections. It also accused the council of blatant racism because of evictions of blacks from local farms, failure to build any low cost housing for blacks, and excluding blacks from facilities such as public resorts and burial in the local cemetery. This report contravened the press code because the council was not afforded proper opportunity to reply to the serious criticisms and because inadequate efforts were made to check the veracity of information supplied by the Mail & Guardian’s informants. The report was consequently unfair, misleading, and in many respects harmfully inaccurate.
The right of the Mail & Guardian to undertake such investigative reporting is emphatically upheld but there should be much greater effort to observe the well-established principles of good journalistic practice.