What’s the use of an ‘off the record’ briefing if people can’t keep secrets? Tawana Kupe considers the question against the Ngcuka leak.
The media controversy around the Zuma/Ngcuka saga has placed the spotlight firmly on the news-making process, which is a good thing for the public: it turns them into more critical news consumers. The controversy raises questions about media credibility, and pits different media organisations and columnists against one other on the question of media practice. These debates are very healthy for democracy.
But perhaps one of the most interesting features of the Zuma/Ngcuka saga is the one about the ‘off the record’ briefing. Those who defend these briefings say they are an important part of their trade, without which they could not work effectively. They swear they will never stop attending them. Those who criticise the practice say it’s principally a means to manipulate the media, or at the very least influence news media to report in a particular way. In other words, off the record briefings are similar to the tricks used by spin doctors and public relations practitioners when they seek to massage the truth, or present favourable images of difficult situations.
Frankly, both sides protest too much. Off the record briefings exist in a grey area, part of a profession seen by some as purveyors of ‘truths’ and ‘falsehoods’ judiciously mixed together.
It’s true that the briefings are a legitimate tool of journalism. Without them, scoops and exclusives would be near impossible. They also serve the purpose (as many editors have argued in their own defense) of providing necessary context to breaking stories – news lacks context these days partly because of its brevity and event orientation. Audiences often cannot get the big picture.
But it’s equally true that off the record briefings are not innocent presentations of objective facts. News deals with the intrigues and power struggles of politics and big business. To some the media are therefore weapons of power and intrigue; or weapons of ‘mass distraction’, as one paper called them.
Further, off the record briefings inherently presume a context of intrigue and secrecy. Because of this atmosphere, what is said is subject to different interpretations by the ‘privileged’ participants. Some politicians use them precisely because they can gauge public opinion from the interpretations that arise. The briefing is also a context in which what is said cannot be uttered in public – either because their truth is difficult to prove, or because the consequences of utterance are too ghastly to contemplate.
It’s useful, in trying to understand off the records briefings, to liken them to a situation where a colleague approaches you at work and says: ‘Please do not tell anyone. I was told this in strict confidence, and I am only telling you.” By telling you they have already broken confidence, so you can now presumably also tell someone, as long as it’s in ‘strictest confidence’. These confidential disclosures spread person by person. As we know, the human propensity to embellish for purposes of clarification – or simply to make the story more interesting – distorts what was originally said.
To an extent then, despite protestations to the contrary, off the record briefings (which were neither invented nor perfected by Bulelani Ngcuka) are meant to be on the record, or are understood to be such. In other words, without saying where or from whom you got the information, you could report.
It’s this grey area that has caused the controversy around Ngcuka’s briefing. The question is not whether off the record briefings should be conducted at all, but whether it was wise in Ngcuka’s case. By inviting editors from competing papers to the same briefing on one of the most controversial issues in post apartheid South Africa, he risked having the information leaked. And it most certainly was.
Prof. Tawana Kupe is head of media studies at Wits University’s School of Literature and Language Studies.