Barely three weeks into the new year, a year journalists swore would be nothing like the old one, it happened again. The day before Judge Hefer’s report confirmed the self-serving agenda of ex Sunday Times reporter Ranjeni Munusamy’s source, the media lay on its back and had its belly tickled by another dodgy source.
Now journalists are asking last year’s question with a little extra urgency: discounting a collective memory lapse on the journalism 101 course in fact-checking and story verification, what’s the deal with all this naiveté?
A fashionable answer is the institutional pursuit of public figure soap opera. It’s also a good answer. On January 20th, when the results of the Hefer Commission were made public, it didn’t demonstrably worry the mainstream press (bar the few notable exceptions) that for three months attention had been diverted from Deputy President Jacob Zuma’s alleged involvement in a corrupt arms deal. More worrying, it seemed, was that National Prosecuting Authority boss Bulelani Ngcuka was “unequivocally” found not to have been an apartheid spy – an outcome that was pretty apparent back in October – and that the steady supply of copy-selling headlines was about to dry up.
Or would have dried up, but for the gift that landed in the media’s lap on January 19th. The end of the banners spawned by Ngcuka, Mo and Mac would not result in a sales slump—a Cape High Court judge was being accused of rape.
Presenting the gift was one Mark Isaacs, whose distraught call to talk radio station 702 early the previous Sunday was all about the following key statement: “My wife has just been raped by a South African judge. We need somebody to assist us. She’s on her way to the police station.”
Alarm bells might have rung on the back of that one – the hysterical tone, the single source, the relationship of the source to the “victim” – but come Monday morning the incident, the name of the judge, and the name of the woman accusing him (the caller’s wife Salome) were splashed on the front pages of the Daily Sun and Beeld. Within a day every major news brand in the country had disclosed the names, except for e.tv. And by Thursday, when the allegations against the judge were unconditionally withdrawn by Salome Isaacs “in consultation with her husband”, every major news brand in the country was wiping away egg —except again for e.tv.
No surprise that e.tv took the chance to heavily salt the omelette, but, given the sniggering earlier in the week about them looking “silly”, they hardly needed justification. On Thursday evening, when e.news managing editor and chief anchor Debora Patta announced that the free-to-air station was taking the “unprecedented step” of delivering an editorial on the matter, what followed truly was a South African TV news first.
“Had the media obeyed the law in this case,” Patta charged, “nobody would know either the name of the victim or the man she accused of raping her. And an innocent man’s reputation would have been protected. Instead, newspapers, radio and TV ran this story with no checks, no balances, simply because it made such fabulous sensational copy.”
Of course, as many a still breakfast-head editor was quick to indicate, the charges were laid in India, so South African law didn’t apply. Mark Rosin, senior attorney at Rosin Wright Rosengarten, sustained the point:
“In terms of South African law, a person charged with a sexual offence cannot be named unless that person has pleaded. This is to protect both accused persons and victims from premature identification. The [current] matter is complicated by the fact that the prosecution will (or will not) be conducted according to Indian law.”
A useful technicality no doubt, but as an excuse it sort of wilted next to the retort of e.tv head of news Joe Thloloe, who commented to the Mail & Guardian that “the audience is South African and both parties will be judged morally in this country.”
Like her boss, Patta was unyielding. In a discussion with The Media the following week, she had lost none of the indignation that had staggered millions of e.news viewers in the editorial. “We look stupid and ignorant. Every negative perception about the media – that we’re sleazy, sensation-hungry hounds – is confirmed when we behave in this manner.”
Patta slammed 702’s “public domain” defense of the Mark Isaacs broadcast as “pathetic” – “who puts it into the public domain if not the media?” – then gauged the long-term cost of the approach: “How do we proceed and get details when there really is a story in the public interest? This is not on the same level as a corruption or murder story.”
But, for Patta and many others, the real harm caused by the Isaacs couple and their dead-keen media accomplices was to the crime of rape.
“The media are on trial again,” Jyoti Mistry, senior lecturer in Wits University’s school of arts, commented to this magazine. “This time little separates responsible journalism and media ethics from gossip, tabloid and sensationalistic reporting. The indulgence of Mark Isaacs by the media in a story that not only trivialised rape but disempowered women has set back the struggle against macho and patriarchal attitudes in this country by at least 10 years.”
And perhaps even more pertinent: “This has left a very sour taste—among activists who have been fighting to create an environment where women are made to feel safe and protected when disclosing violations.”
A consolation for South African media (not that any are deserved) is that we have company. Ours is not the only national press club baffled by the problem of identity in sexual offense cases. British media’s consistent outing of “rapists” before charges are laid recently prompted the Guardian‘s media analyst Zoe Williams to write: “We might just as well be handing out criminal records to people who have criminalesque haircuts.” And the US media’s handling of a certain basketballer’s predicament is not much better.
A consolation, maybe. But, like the legal loopholes grabbed at by those local editors with their own shady haircuts (over-easy style), no excuse.