/ 7 January 2004

No confidence in confidential briefings

Hefer and his commission now seem like history. However, amid the dust whirling in his wake, the controversy of confidential briefings remains to be resolved.

In the interim, everyone associated with ”off-the-record” media dealings is treading on tiptoes:

  • Sources wonder if editors really will respect confidentiality as they are ethically supposed to.
  • Editors fret about being caught in a situation that ties their hands in terms of pursuing and publicising information tabled to them in confidence.
  • People maligned by secretive spin doctors are concerned that editors will be unfairly influenced against them.
  • Members of the public fear that the media may be compromised and co-opted by involvement in what are sometimes called ”deep backgrounders”.

After the ”Bulelani briefing” that started all the trouble, no parties are clear whether confidential briefings will benefit them or backfire.

Here’s a recap of how these touchy transactions got to top the agenda. Part of the story starts (at least publicly) with the National Director of Public Prosecutions, Bulelani Ngcuka, overseeing the Scorpions investigations into key powerful figures in 2003. Thereafter, an anonymous smear e-mail about him was circulated to media circles.

In response, Ngcuka convened a number of confidential briefings with different members of the media. The best-known occasion was attended by a group of African, male editors. At this particular event, Ngcuka is alleged to have said, in effect, that he was being attacked by corrupt Indians who in turn had misled Deputy President Jacob Zuma. All of these people, the gist apparently went, were feeling the sting of the Scorpions, and were trying to topple Ngcuka accordingly.

Unlike a normal press conference, this briefing was what the trade describes as ”off the record”. The Hefer hearings revealed that Ngcuka apparently asked his audience to put down their pens early in his presentation. But it seems it was never clarified what this actually meant.

Clearly, the point of any confidential briefing of editors is to impact on coverage. In Ngcuka’s case, he would have wanted, at least, to counter the smears; at best, to have him and the Scorpions portrayed positively. There may even have been a political agenda of putting the boot into the Zuma group as pretenders to presidential power. But whatever Ngcuka’s motive, the message he gave would have been intended to go beyond the briefing room and echo in the publications of the editors he addressed. Why else go to the trouble?

At first, the briefing seemed to have had the kind of effect that Ngcuka would have desired. The then City Press editor, Vusi Mona, published a glowing article about Ngcuka. And, if Mac Maharaj is to be believed, the ”Bulelani briefing” also prompted the deputy editor of The Star to pursue a story that potentially reflected badly on Maharaj — a shrill detractor of the Scorpions.

According to Maharaj, The Star‘s Jovial Rantao learnt from none other than Ngcuka of a pending arrest warrant for Maharaj’s wife; the occasion for this alleged leak having been the infamous briefing.

If so, a story dishing dirt on Maharaj would have played to Ngcuka’s favour. But not if it was traced back to him.

For his part, Rantao himself refuses to confirm that his Scorpions source for this tidbit of information was Ngcuka, or whether he obtained the information at Ngcuka’s meeting with the editors. For the moment, let us suppose that Maharaj is right, and Rantao was indeed following a lead from that fateful briefing. The implications are intriguing.

Would Rantao’s contacting Maharaj mean that he reneged on the ”off-the-record” character of Ngcuka’s briefing? And would this put him in the same league as Mona, who went on to earn strong opprobrium in the profession by breaking wholly with confidentiality through spreading a version of the briefing?

The answer to both questions is no: Rantao is not comparable to Mona. The reasons for this bring us to the crux of the controversy about confidential briefings. First, while Rantao may have (unsuccessfully) asked Maharaj about his wife’s fate, he did not publish on the topic after subsequently hearing (from Maharaj) that Ngcuka had denied an immanent arrest. (It was Maharaj, not Rantao, who brought the story into the public arena.) Second, Rantao kept — and still keeps — confidential the identity of his Scorpions source.

In all this, The Star‘s deputy editor has stuck to journalistic convention. This includes even his probable understanding of the pens-down provision of the briefing. Presumably, Rantao believed that the information could be used provided it could be confirmed in other ways, and that it was only the identity of the specific source (Ngcuka) that was to be protected. This is a common, if expedient, journalistic ethic when faced with ambiguous ”off-the-record” parameters.

In short, and assuming that Rantao acted as a result of the briefing, his conduct was a far cry from what Mona went on to do, which was to plaster the contents of the briefing all over the public domain.

It is illuminating to consider these developments from what might have been Ngcuka’s point of view at this point. Maharaj called him up directly to complain that someone in the Scorpions was leaking information to Rantao about his wife facing arrest. This would not have been the way Ngcuka would have wanted his briefing to pan out.

Suppose further that Ngcuka in this scenario decided to deny to Maharaj what at least one editor had taken to be a hot tip during the briefing. If Rantao and Maharaj were right, Ngcuka would have had instantly to change his mind about the arrest. Either way, and still assuming that all this was traceable back to the briefing, it was clear that an unravelling was under way.

It is easy to imagine in this picture Rantao being left to wonder just how reliable Ngcuka was in regard to information that seemed like something worth further investigation.

All this hinges, of course, on the assumption that the Scorpions’ boss was indeed Rantao’s source, the occasion the briefing, and that The Star‘s man indeed interpreted the confidentiality characteristic as allowing for following up information while shielding identity. But even if any of these assumptions are wrong, one can see the speculation engendered by the briefing.

Some commentators have criticised Ngcuka for giving off-the-record briefings per se. Perhaps. Others feel that, with hindsight and in regard to this particular briefing at least, Ngcuka should have made it clear that both his information and identity were to be kept secret. That might have given him some protection — until Mona broke fundamental journalistic protocol on both issues.

On the other hand, from a media and public point of view, the idea of a briefing where literally everything is supposed to remain top secret seems like a rather pointless exercise. Or, more accurately, it seems like an exercise in duplicity, because, of course, the intention of any briefing is precisely to influence editors and consequently coverage. It is that old contradiction of trying to keep and eat one’s cake at the same time.

The Rantao-Maharaj fiasco may have been an unscripted outcome of Bulelani’s briefing. Another unanticipated effect was the impact — or claimed impact — on Sunday Times journalist Ranjeni Munusamy. Aware that the briefing had occurred, she argued that her would-be exposé of Ngcuka as a possible apartheid-era spy was being blocked by her editor, Mathatha Tsedu, who she felt had been soft-soaped at the event.

We know what happened next: an impatient Munusamy took the story to a receptive Mona at City Press. From the evidence at the Hefer commission, it seems that that paper’s editor by this stage had done a 180-degree turn in his attitude to Ngcuka. In contrast to his eulogy a week after the briefing, he appeared to beextremely hostile to Ngcuka. The reason, it seems from the Hefer evidence, was his belated (and incorrect) belief that he himself had come under scrutiny from the Scorpions.

One can well imagine Mona’s feelings at the time. He would have wanted to avoid attention by anyone, not least the Scorpions, in his operating a public-relations business alongside his editorship — not least because the same business had run a grotesquely hyperbolic advert in his own newspaper in which the Mpumalanga government claimed that ”freedom the press has become a licence to kill”. The ad accused the media of seeking to ”send every black official to jail, including the president himself”.

An angry Mona, perceiving himself to be a Scorpions victim, no doubt felt he had been suckered at the Ngcuka briefing into believing that the director was a good guy. He went on the offensive. Accordingly, his paper ”sexed up” Munusamy’s hatchet job on the ”apartheid spy” with headlines that went even beyond her information.

In subsequent weeks, as the story ricocheted right and left, a still-vengeful Mona drew up a version of the Ngcuka briefing and passed it to a pal in public relations, who sent it on to a Business Day columnist who in turn put it into print. Subsequently Mona also published the damaging account in City Press. The publicising of the ”transcript” of the briefing looked pretty bad for Ngcuka.

Apart from the controversial contents of the briefing, after the fact of it became public, questions were asked about Ngcuka’s selection criteria for his audience. Some asked about the absence of editors of other race groups (or women for that matter). And although there had also been the exclusion of Justice Malala, who edits ThisDay, the issue was whether the otherwise exclusively African racial make-up lent itself to Ngcuka playing an Africanist card in his remarks.

The original pens-down briefing had travelled a long way by this stage. No doubt, Ngcuka strongly rued having ever given it. And yet he was not the only party to be damaged by the fallout. It did no good to the media either:

  • Mona had hoped to cover himself in glory by revealing his version of what was said at the briefing. Instead, his action exposed him as an unprincipled operator with no respect for journalistic conventions.
  • The editors at the briefing came under criticism for having availed themselves to hearing secret and possibly racist PR by Ngcuka.
  • More profoundly, from the point of view of the public, the notion of editors — any editors — attending confidential briefings smacked of elitism and exclusion in the profession.

In fact, the damage is even worse. Mona lent his paper to both his personal agenda as well as to external agendas (those of Munusamy and Maharaj). There was no knowing what other behind-the-scenes forces were at play in the media.

Understandably, everyone wanted to know about this sordid business of secret sources to whom editors lent their ears. What other confidential briefings were taking place, and why were most editors — people in the business of informing the public — agreeing to be silenced (to one degree or another) by attending them?

The result of all this bad aftertaste is that if media credibility is to be restored, everyone — not least, and not only, the participants in ”off-the-record” dealings — needs to know what these engagements are all about.

As communicators, the media have not done very well thus far in sharing with the public the purpose of confidential briefings. There are no clearly communicated conventions on what ”off the record” may refer to. The pitfalls and the precautions are not explained.

All this may be because an elaborated position has yet to be thrashed out by South Africa’s media. A start has been made by the South African National Editors Forum with a debate on the issue in November. But there is a great deal still to be done for the dust to settle on this controversy.

E-mail Guy Berger directly if you have a question about this article.

Guy Berger is head of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University and deputy chair of the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef). He was recently nominated for the World Technology Awards.