”The past year has been an annus horribilis for the South African media,” wrote Max du Preez in The Star last December. ”And they are the only people in the world who cannot complain they were misunderstood or had a bad press when they come under pressure.”
That’s the trouble with media. When events in the newsroom are big enough to make the news, it will generally turn out to be a bad day.
So in 2003 South African media’s bad day did not end. The newsroom was never far from the news, and just about all the stories called journalism’s credibility into question.
Of course some stories were more damaging than others. The narratives surrounding former editor of City Press Vusi Mona and former Sunday Times reporter Ranjeni Munusamy stood apart in terms of havoc wrought.
In the space of three months, from early September to late November, the names of Mona and Munusamy became synonymous with media’s public humiliation. It is tough to guess who caused the most harm, but that’s partly because the two narratives intersect at key points.
The unholy alliance began when Munusamy, having been blocked by then Sunday Times editor Mathatha Tsedu, leaked a story to one of Mona’s reporters alleging that Scorpions boss Bulelani Ngcuka was an apartheid spy. Mona ran the piece on the front page of City Press on September 7th, Tsedu summarily fired Munusamy, and just over a month later the Hefer Commission commenced – it’s task to investigate the truth of the allegations against Ngcuka.
Meanwhile, between publication of the spy allegations and the first day of the commission, Mona had become the subject of another investigation. In late September The Star revealed that the City Press editor was a director of a public relations company paid millions to repair the Mpumalanga government’s tarnished image. Mona offered to stand down while Media 24 looked into the potential conflict of interest.
And where was Munusamy? Ironic as it would turn out to be, she was using her time to rehearse for a cameo role on national television as saviour of the free press. Swearing she had leaked the Ngcuka spy allegations to City Press ”for the sake of the profession”, she would never, she said, reveal her sources to Hefer or anyone else.
In the event agent RS 452, the apartheid spy Munusamy’s sources said was Ngcuka, turned out to be Vanessa Brereton, a white woman from the Eastern Cape. A month later, under cross-examination at the Hefer Commission, Mac Maharaj pointed to Mo Shaik as one of Munusamy’s sources.
Munusamy’s grandstanding had come to nought. She had managed to extend her fifteen minutes of fame to almost fifteen weeks, and the fact that she was responsible for the taxpayer footing the bill on a futile commission of inquiry did not seem to bother her in the least.
”Miss Information”, as the Sunday Times called her in an article by Andrew Donaldson in late November, had sold journalism to the politicos.
”She had transformed into a stranger; a conspirator in an ugly, immoral and vindictive plot to bring down someone who, from the outside, merely happened to be the head of an organisation that had investigated powerful figures,” wrote Phylicia Oppelt for the same newspaper two weeks later.
Back at Media 24 the investigation into Mona’s links with a PR company had been concluded. On November 12th the company announced they found no specific evidence of a conflict of interest, but, tellingly enough, Mona resigned anyway.
The resignation brought to two the number of senior editors who had lost their jobs in the space of a week. The previous Saturday, after only 14 months at the helm of the Sunday Times, Tsedu had been fired by Johncom senior management. Claiming unfair dismissal, Tsedu charged the paper’s owners with racism. In his reply to management on why he should not be fired, Tsedu had also alluded to unhappiness about his (vindicated) decision not to publish the Ngcuka spy allegations.
By now the year was drawing to a close and it seemed the media couldn’t possibly cover itself in more ignominy, but the nastiest was yet to come.
On November 26th Mona snitched to the Hefer Commission about an off-the-record briefing held by Ngcuka in July, outraging other senior editors who had been present at the confidential meeting.
”It is a sad day when senior journalists, in particular editors, can’t be trusted to uphold the most sacred tenet of our profession,” then Mail & Guardian editor Mondli Makhanya commented in The Star. ”I think the sad part is that the relationship between journalists and the people we speak to has been compromised.”
The next day, under intense cross-examination by advocate Kessie Naidu, Mona admitted to the commission that he had been ”reckless” in publishing the Ngcuka spy allegations. He conceded that the story’s subheading was misleading [see timeline], and that the body of the article actually stated that Ngcuka was ”possibly” agent RS 452.
A major problem for Mona was that his admissions were made in the afternoon. During the morning session he had vehemently defended his decision to run the story. Amongst other areas where Mona conceded the falsehood of his earlier testimonies was his statement that Ngcuka had intended the off-the-record briefing to be public.
That Sunday City Press published a front page apology to Ngcuka, and the following week the commission’s evidence leader Naidu recommended that perjury charges be brought against Mona.
The bitterness of the journalism fraternity at the extent of the destruction caused by Mona was plainly evident in an editorial run at the time by Mail & Guardian:
”Mona is now lost to the journalistic profession. Who will be our conscience now? Who will we turn to when we need guidance on whether to offer our paid services to politicians and government departments who want their marble polished? How will we know when to betray the confidence of those with whom we interact in the execution of our duties? Who will show us the art of lifting information from scurrilous unsigned documents and publishing it in the name of moral conscience?”
Thus ended the Mona and Munusamy narratives for 2003, and, while the two could not be outdone on the profundity of their ethical misdemeanours, they were not the only outstanding performers in journalism’s dark year.
Due in part to his refusal to issue a mea culpa, Darrel Bristow-Bovey’s unacknowledged borrowing from the works of international authors Bill Bryson, PJ O’Rourke and Jeremy Paxman was probably the most enduring of the year’s nauseating stories. The Star first published the exposé in July, but coverage continued well past late September, when the last of Bristow-Bovey’s columns were axed by Cape Times editor Chris Whitfield and Business Day editor Peter Bruce.
In the midst of the Bristow-Bovey plagiarism saga, editor of Elle magazine Cynthia Vongai was caught performing a cut-and-paste act of her own, meeting the deadlines for her Sowetan column through liberal use of a website called askmen.com. Happily, Johnnic Publishing’s crisis management plan ensured the story got killed early: Vongai was soon called before a disciplinary committee and forced to resign.
And fabrication was not just restricted to plagiarism. In September a Daily Sun reporter was charged for falsely claiming that he had been hijacked, this after the newspaper had run his lead story about the hijacking and how ineffective the police had been. The reporter was alleged to have crashed a company car during a drinking spree and claimed the hijacking to cover up the fact.
2003 also had a few smaller tales, little anecdotes of shame complementing the major disgraces, but they just reinforced the same questions. Where did media go wrong? Why now? Who’s to blame?
Max du Preez found the answer in history. Before 1990, he explained in his column in The Star, media served ”a highly polarised and politicised public”; then everything changed when democracy came.
”A new class of journalist emerged: those who thought the profession meant money and social status – or that it was a stepping stone to a top government or corporate job. Media institutions came under unprecedented pressure to produce profits for their owners. In the process many editors became bean-counters and public relations experts rather than leaders of newsrooms from where public opinion was informed.”
Du Preez suggested that local journalism could do with its own Kamp Staaldraad. Maybe he’ll get his way and a decade from now we’ll see 2003 as the year media learned the price of not acknowledging its responsibilities.
2003: A Record of Human Rights Coverage
Compiled exclusively for The Media by the Media Monitoring Project
Reporting on children
Media coverage of children in 2003 had its highlights, but in general can be described as substandard. There were instances throughout the year where abused children and those involved in criminal proceedings were identified in reports, despite legislation aimed at their protection in these circumstances.
Radio, television and print all ignored the law and key ethical principles. As an example, in November reports of a racial incident involving children at a Cape Town school identified both the victim and alleged perpetrator.
There was also the widely publicised case in March, where a boy contracted HIV from a blood transfusion in a Pretoria hospital. While some media made it clear that there were ethical issue involved in their decision to name the child, most media simply neglected to mention their obligations.
In October the story of a girl who was abused by her father, before the father killed himself and his wife, saw the girl’s name published.
Amongst the few instances where the media could be commended was a front page story in Beeld, which detailed the trauma of a young child who had to testify before the court, but withheld the child’s identity.
Reporting on race and racism
With respect to the media coverage of race and racism in 2003, the media can be commended for ensuring that incidents were brought to the public’s attention. However, coverage still tended to focus on the dramatic elements and to deal with the matter of racism simplistically.
Reporting on race and racism largely failed to tackle the issue in all its complexity and diversity. The much-publicised Geo Cronje/Quinton Davids rugby race incident serves as a useful illustration, where it was clear that in an effort to condemn racism the key concerns were not clearly thought through. An example of this was the apology on the front page of the City Press for an editorial in that same newspaper.
While it is positive for the media to highlight racism whenever and wherever it may surface, it is irresponsible to categorise an event simply as racist without providing the necessary supporting evidence. This seems to have been the case with the Cronje/Davids incident. For two weeks following the story’s first appearance at the end of August racism was pushed forward as the cause, but readers and viewers were seldom provided with the ”evidence” on which the media based the claims.
Reporting on poverty
Poverty, while being one of the country’s most important and serious stumbling blocks to the attainment of true democracy, has for the most part been reported on in a very limited fashion by the media. 2003 was no exception. Poverty was very often presented as a single manifestation of binary opposites; i.e. if you aren’t rich, you are necessarily poor.
A number of promising items surfaced during the Growth and Development Summit in June, during which prominent concerns such as unemployment and homelessness in relation to government delivery were discussed. But this was primarily in response to the event itself, thus becoming a reflection of the event rather than a proactive effort on the part of the media to discuss these issues in their entirety.
While coverage of land restitution, land redistribution and development was prominent, it was concerning that the voices of the poor (or in this case ”the landless”) were rarely heard. Rather, an official voice, be it from government or a party official, was chosen to speak on the poor’s behalf. It is also concerning that issues of poverty are not as widely discussed as, for example, issues of race and gender.
Reporting on gender
Reporting on gender in a balanced, fair and accurate manner is one of the biggest challenges facing the media. The challenge is made all the more difficult by the recent launch of a tabloid that works to objectify women and appears to have numerous ”page 3” women images. Gender activists have on numerous occasions called for news media to move beyond traditional role stereotyping.
In 2003 there were some positive advances made on the subject. The year witnessed considerably greater coverage of the 16 Days of Activism Against Violence on Women and Children campaign, and for this the media are to be commended.
At the same time, however, stereotypical role reporting is still very much a reality in our media. At the end of 2002, according to figures taken from the Gender Media Baseline Study, women sources were accessed in less than 20% of news items. In 2003 women are still largely sourced in areas traditionally thought of as female areas of expertise, but the year saw a degree of improvement, as evidenced by more women being sourced in the fields of business and economics.
There was also a considerable amount of reporting during the period around National Women’s Day. The trend during this period was for articles to feature ”strong” women regularly.
The Media Monitoring Project (MMP) is a non-governmental organisation that monitors the media within a framework of human rights. The MMP has been monitoring the media since 1993, and has done extensive research into the representation of race, racism, gender, children and coverage of our democratic elections.