In an after-piece twist to the act of plagiarism committed by columnist Darrel Bristow-Bovey, two of the country’s foremost media personalities squared off at a Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa (BCCSA) tribunal on Friday.
Mail & Guardian columnist Robert Kirby had lodged a complaint at the BCCSA against SABC broadcaster Jeremy Maggs, following remarks made by Maggs on his Media@SAfm show in September this year.
In a written complaint, Kirby said Maggs had two days later responded on air to an article of his published in the M&G in September 26 concerning the Bristow-Bovey matter, in which Maggs referred to Kirby as “an ageing and bitter Western Cape” columnist.
“What pissed me off was being called ageing and bitter,” Kirby told the Mail & Guardian Online on Friday.
Kirby felt attacking a person’s age is unconstitutional, saying the Bill of Rights specifies one may not discriminate according to age. It also contradicts the SABC’s code of conduct, he said.
Kirby contended in his complaint to the BCCSA that Maggs did not afford him the right to reply, and also accused Maggs of inaccurate reporting and a lack of professionalism because he said, in the SAfm programme: “A simple phone call to the radio station would have cleared matters up, but whoever let accuracy interfere with a good column?”
Kirby said that Maggs defamed him and dismissed his work as sub-professional on the basis of age, and which, in context, was an accusation that Kirby was senile.
Kirby further said that Maggs and his producers had abused their position of privilege by using a radio programme with a wide audience to answer criticism levelled at them in a newspaper column with not only a “limited readership”, but one which could by no means be adjudged fairly or accurately as being the same as the radio’s listenership.
Kirby opined that Maggs had made the statements as payback for what he had written in previous columns, in which he described Maggs as the “SABC’s famous talking corpse”.
A few years ago, when Maggs presented the TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Kirby wrote that Maggs looked like he had just come from the embalmer, a comment that was a forerunner for the “walking corpse” comment.
However, Maggs “got cross”, Kirby said on Friday, and complained that the thing came back to haunt him, with colleagues making jibes like “dead man walking” and referring to “grave matters”.
Kirby asked the four-member BCCSA tribunal — comprising chairperson Kobus van Rooyen, SC, Reverend Dawie du Toit, Dr Linda Gilfillan and Zenobia Africa — to order the SABC to broadcast an unreserved retraction of the “derogatory and hurtful” comments made regarding his age by Maggs, and that an unqualified broadcast apology be made to him.
The SABC should also acknowledge that the remarks constituted an unwarranted invasion of Kirby’s right to privacy, and since the remarks were made twice in the September programme, the apologies and retractions should be broadcast twice.
In reply, Maggs said he was “dismayed” at the distress he had caused Kirby.
Maggs said his remarks were directly related to Kirby referring to him as a corpse, and the constant ribbing it caused among colleagues.
It also resulted in “damage to my own brand” he said.
Maggs admitted “mea culpa” to not checking his facts when he said on air that another so-called anti-Bristow-Bovey columnist, David Bullard, was unavailable to debate the plagiarism issue on air.
“If I got my dates wrong, I will apologise to Kirby,” said Maggs.
He said he was driven to repeating the “ageing Western Cape columnist” reference twice in the same programme, by his reaction of “extreme irritation and extreme annoyance” at his being called a corpse.
“If Kirby wants to play in the media celebrity pool … [and] there are lots of Johannesburg journalists who’ve felt his sharp pen … there are occassions to slap back, but to take it to this degree [lodge a complaint] was taking it a bit too far,” he said.
Maggs drew a distinction between talk-show radio and actuality programmes, saying talk shows are a “funny little thing”.
He rejected outright that he had abused his position as broadcaster, and said that accuracy and integrity is integral to his role as a journalist.
Van Rooyen, a professor of law and the tribunal chairperson, asked whether the written word could be answered by the spoken word, something which the two protagonists might have discussed as they sat down together after the hearing concluded.
Van Rooyen said judgement would be delivered in a few weeks’ time.
The argument between Maggs and Kirby came in a week when the media had been shaken up by the testimony of former City Press editor Vusi Mona at the Hefer commission, with many journalists believing Mona broke the journalistic code of ethics by revealing what had been said at an off-the-record briefing earlier this year by National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka for a group of black editors.
“It does not say a lot about certain areas of the media,” Kirby told the M&G Online, agreeing that the matter has become a disgrace to the journalistic profession.
However, he also saw it in a positive light, saying it’s a much-needed “kick up the arse” for the profession, “just like the [Bristow-Bovey] plagiarism thing”.
Kirby said he won’t be writing about Maggs in his next column.
The Mail & Guardian Online contacted Maggs’s agent, but Maggs had yet to return the call at the time this article was published.