She’s back. Writing front-page stories for ThisDay, following a brief resurrection in Business Day last month. The correspondent who caused all the trouble in 2003, or at least a great deal of it. Returned to public life.
The rehabilitation of Ranjeni Munusamy, the tarnished former Sunday Times senior political writer, caught many people off guard — not least many journalists. Now her byline is in your face every day as she drives political coverage at the otherwise upmarket newspaper ThisDay.
Maybe Munusamy’s return is not so surprising, given that another discredited journo, Darryl Bristow-Bovey, has already been reinstated on yet another would-be ”quality” paper, the Sunday Independent.
What are the editorial bosses doing in making such seemingly sleazy appointments? (Besides, that is, supremely underestimating the significance of what they’re doing?)
Munusamy, let us remember, was the source of City Press‘s shabby story that National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka was an apartheid spy — claims that turned out to be the self-serving crud of Mo Shaik and Mac Maharaj.
She had spurned the higher standards of her own paper at the time, the Sunday Times, to pass the tale on to Vusi Mona, then editor of City Press. He, it later emerged, was prepared to publish anything — testifying even that ”confirmation” of the spy story by infamous security policeman Gideon Nieuwoudt was good enough for him.
It also bears recalling the scenes of Munusamy’s undisguised attachment to Shaik during the Hefer commission inquiry into the spy claims. The images bore scant resemblance to the behaviour of a seasoned hack whose first instinct would be scepticism towards sources.
No one knows Munusamy’s real motives in promoting Shaik and Maharaj’s agendas, but whatever these may have been, her actions incontestably smacked of conduct highly unbecoming to a professional journalist.
It made one wonder about her role as heading up the once-heralded, but effectively dysfunctional, Presidential Press Corps. Were any games being played there? And, now she’s back in business, will she take up this position again?
There was no mourning in the media at the time of Munusamy’s swift exit from the Sunday Times. And, later, her refusal to testify before the Hefer commission elicited a chorus of hostile coverage arguing that her circumstances should preclude her from claiming journalistic immunity at the commission.
Even though several media organisations, including the South African National Editors’ Forum, backed the arguments against her being forced to give evidence, they also made it clear that they were supporting a principle, not an individual.
In the face, then, of Munusamy’s recent history and controversy, why did ThisDay take her on board? And why, likewise, did the Sunday Independent restore Bristow-Bovey to a journalistic pedestal? This is the man, after all, who proved to be a serial stealer of the writings of Bill Bryson and PJ O’Rourke.
To my knowledge, neither Munusamy nor Bristow-Bovey has publicly admitted to the deeply problematic character of their respective disrespect for journalism. Anyone out there seen any expression of remorse or seen them pledge to try for professionalism?
Compounding things, the pair’s new employers have not brought their readers into their confidence about why they are getting the kiss of life. The meaning of such ”silence of the editors”? We’re left to interpret it as them underplaying what R&D did just a short while ago. I’m sure they don’t condone what happened, but some readers — understandably — will read it that way.
The net result is that these two problem children of the media are being recycled back to us as if they were straightforward practitioners of journalism. A craft that, we are expected to believe, acts honestly, transparently and in the public interest.
It might be different if Bristow-Bovey was writing a column titled The Plagiarist (as one wag has suggested). It would not be untoward if Munusamy was asked to write an opinion piece as a commentator with explicit and clearly stated allegiances.
Instead, we’re expected to accept the pair as normal reporters — as pros who can tell it like it is. This surely underrates the intellect, if not the integrity, of readers. It certainly mocks anyone’s desire for confidence that the media can be relied on to give it to us straight.
So, the question then is whether those editors who gave Munusamy and Bristow-Bovey an unwarranted lifeline have ”lost the plot”. I suspect that their reasons for the appointments probably lie in a focus on specific lines in the script. In particular, on the bottom lines.
In this light, re-enlisting the pair should probably be read as acts of desperation to drive up circulation. In the case of Bristow-Bovey, it’s likely to be based on an assumed allure of his controversial character.
Yet such a rationale would be short-sighted, and one likely to cheapen the stature of the Sunday Independent in the long run. Its effect will be to undercut the business model of what a serious Sunday paper should stand for.
With Munusamy, it’s a case of a new paper, ThisDay, having lost its previous political editor and scrabbling wildly to fill the void. Rather than recruiting and developing new talent, however, the publication has chosen to scrape the proverbial bottom of the barrel. (In contrast, the Sunday Times has creatively resorted to getting skilled former Reuters bureau chief Brendan Boyle to plump out its political coverage).
Munusamy’s history proves that she can get sexy stories to fill the pages. But her new employers (not necessarily conterminous with ”her bosses”) seem not to have thought further about whether the information in them can be trusted. Nor has enough consideration gone into what kind of signal her appointment sends about the image of that paper as a whole. It’s hardly as if she’s writing trivia.
Part of the malaise behind these two appointments can, perhaps, be traced to a broader vacuum within South Africa’s media. The pressure is on to sell papers and make money, but the wider parameters and longer-term constraints on this are much more ambiguous.
Everyone of course has an opinion on ”the role of the media”. But within the media today, there is too little clarity, and even less consensus, about what this role should properly be.
Ten years of democracy have caused confusion in the ranks.
Early on, the new democratic government put a serious question to post-apartheid journalists: ”Your institution was complacent about a racist society; how come then that you only wake up to a strong watchdog role when the good guys get into office?”
There are at least two answers to this poser. One is to say: ”Yes, we are belated, but better late than never.” The other is to say: ”Yes, we take the point, and we agree to support the national effort to reconstruct South Africa.”
The first path involves a knee-jerk adversarial stance towards authority; the second leads to corporatist-style partnership where independence is tempered.
South African journalism since 1994 has been shifting slowly from the one emphasis to the other. Today, there is a hybrid: an uncertain and erratic combination of critical and celebratory coverage, in which shades of grey are more prevalent than blacks and whites.
This complex universe is in contrast to the stark morality of yore. Pre-1994, some things were clearly right and others clearly wrong. Some journos were spies with no place in the newsroom; others were dilettantes needing relocation to PR.
Today, morality in media, as in the wider society, is much murkier. Standards slide around all over the place.
It may be that if we can sort out the unresolved challenge of adequately redefining the role of South African journalism, the smaller stuff will fall into clearer place.
It may even be that the reappearance of Munusamy and Bristow-Bovey will rekindle fundamental debate about the ethics, identity and aspirations of the media.
If not, however, the unhappy appointments are unlikely to stop. Judge Joos Hefer, after seeing Mona admit to dozens of ethical desecrations, confidently predicted that the former City Press editor will never find work in the media again.
I hope we don’t have to tell his worship: ”Watch this space!”
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.