Mondli Makhanya told this story in a bar a couple of months ago. It’s not great form to publish anecdotes given over by another journalist after a few drinks, but there’s nothing particularly sensitive about this one and it does reveal something about Makhanya’s character and his attitude to the Sunday Times. Also, it was told at his own expense.
So one afternoon last summer – he had only been at the helm of the Sunday Times for a few weeks – Makhanya leaves his desk and goes downstairs to see what’s up in the Business Day newsroom. He’s confronted by the chaotic scene of a daily on deadline, and can’t help himself. “All this work for forty thousand,” he says to nobody specific. A senior reporter on the paper, who has been careful not to let years of such deadlines compromise his wit, hits back in a heartbeat. “Ah, but what a forty thousand!”
There is that anomalous detail in his story, but Makhanya’s deflation of Business Day‘s circulation by 2,000 sales just serves to emphasise the main point – when your own circulation is over the half-million mark, what’s a few thousand here or there? Because lying behind the yarn is an acknowledgement that the Sunday Times is the big daddy of all print titles in the country, the continent even. It’s not niche, not expressly targeted at any segment other than the demographically vague LSMs 6-10. It’s a mass audience beast, Johncom’s favourite child, a cash-cow that pulls in combined sales and advertising revenue of around R500-million a year. If you’re 34-years-old and suddenly the editor of such a brute, a self-effacing joke in a bar is probably the best way to digest your new reality.
Of course it’s when he’s in his corner office that Makhanya’s approach to his reality takes on the requisite gravity. His predecessor Mathatha Tsedu had been kicked out of the same office after only 14 months, and the messy public spat (Tsedu had alleged “ulterior motives” in an article in the Sowetan) led Johncom chief executive Connie Molusi to issue a release citing the reasons for the dismissal as “failing to edit the newspaper in a manner consistent with his contract of employment”, a loss of readers and revenue, and an exodus of senior staff.
It’s understandable then that “daunting” is the first word Makhanya chooses to describe his mindset upon settling into the office in late January, although he does amend it to “challenging” after a moment’s reflection. “I’d been here before as political editor,” he says. “I kind of knew that what you put on page one has more impact than what anyone else puts on. But obviously there was a certain climate. I was aware that I was walking into an environment that would need strength. We needed to be the newspaper that was breaking the news, not the newspaper that was the news.”
So the chief mission of Makhanya’s first few months, as he (and doubtlessly Johncom management) saw it, was to ensure that the Sunday Times regained its weight. The editor speaks of an introduction of “policies” aimed at protecting the title from being viewed or experienced as a “crisis-ridden ship.” Significantly, there’s a subtle use of past tense in the telling. Does it suggest the mission has been completed?
“I believe the ship has been stabilised. The feedback from people internally is that this is a much happier place. Nobody is jumping overboard. We have had 2 or 3 resignations, but they have not been out of bitterness.”
There’s no apparent reason to doubt it. Still, given the history of this media company, “internal feedback” isn’t a great barometer for anything. As a special report in the Financial Mail said of its own parent (now Johncom) in 1999: “A quaint trait at South African Associated Newspapers (Saan), as Times Media was until 1987, was that it often fired its best editors.”
Amongst those editors were Allister Sparks, Tony Heard and Ken Owen, and the latter was quoted in the same report: “When I left [the Sunday Times editorship] it fell back (under Pottinger) into Myburgh’s formula, which I think is anachronistic. So I didn’t really make a dent. To change an institution is no light work. I set the paper’s highest ABC circulation (567,934 for the first half of 1993) and it made a lot of money.”
Owen continued: “The managers were actively hostile to good journalism because it cost money. They wanted an advertising medium, not a newspaper. And they sabotaged any attempt to change what was for them a comfortable situation: status, company cars, first-class air tickets, glamour, the chance to hobnob with the great. And not too much work.”
Of course Owen was fired from the Business Day, not the Sunday Times, but the point is made: there’s no truck in messing with the formula. Whatever Owen may be attributing to Tertius Myburgh, it’s generally accepted that former editor Joel Mervis conceived of this renowned formula, which Anton Harber defined thus (in his Business Day column): “for every page of ground-breaking investigation—, Mervis gave us a page of cheap and nasty titillation.”
Makhanya, for his part, is well aware of the model behind the title’s success. “This newspaper is a kaleidoscope,” he says. “Some call it a mongrel, others a hybrid. It is many newspapers in one. We have 3,5-million readers, so it has to be ‘everything for everybody’.” But what he rejects is the view (bitterly put forward by Owen) that good journalism is anathema to management. “Because the Sunday Times is such a key to Johncom’s success, they do plough in the resources. I can safely say that I have the resources I need. If I want to send a journalist to Iraq, I send one. That’s not to sing the praises of my employers, though.”
Praise singing. There’s a phrase that’s getting thrown around a lot. Sarah Crowe, in an article for Focus last year, noted how more than a few local journalists are taking flak from media observers for being President Mbeki’s imbongi. “Under the administration of Thabo Mbeki,” she wrote, “it is a truism that if you’re black and critical of the government you’re either unpatriotic or, worse still, dominated by or thinking like whites, while if you’re white and critical you’re a racist.” Crowe then went on to cite Makhanya, at the time editor of the Mail & Guardian, who “soliders on, ignoring those critics who accuse him of not being truly African.”
Makhanya remembers the piece. He wasn’t happy about it. “There are certain things I believe. I still believe in the Freedom Charter. I have strong views about the values of this republic, and I get very angry when people stray from those values. It’s not about being ‘brave enough’ to differ with the government.”
Coincidentally, at the time of the interview Makhanya was in the process of drafting a response to the August 5th “Letter from the President”, which was dedicated to haranguing the Sunday Times for its “entirely wrong” report that no additional funds had been set aside for the Expanded Public Works Programme, as well as for its “seemingly complete ignorance of how our 10-year-old system of government works.” Near the end of the letter President Mbeki stated: “We need to decontaminate the news.”
The offending Sunday Times piece, under the header “Mbeki passes the buck on job creation,” had also prompted a telephone call to Makhanya from ANC head of the presidency Smuts Ngonyama, who, according to Makhanya, said that “certain forces” wanted to create mistrust in the ANC as a ruling party. “Who are those forces?” Makhanya had responded. “Am I a force as well?”
Makhanya is unambiguous about the principles at play here. He does not see media as the political opposition; he believes rather “in the clichés”: media as a watchdog, media making sure things work, media holding government accountable. “On government’s part, there’s a misunderstanding of media’s role,” he says. “When we publish there is always a reasonable chance we will make mistakes. But I think there’s a deep mistrust and suspicion from the pre-’94 era. Most people in the higher echelons still see us through those eyes; they haven’t realised yet that they can use media to communicate their own message. Obviously we’ll fight. Obviously we’ll get up people’s noses. But they must accept that’s what happens in an open society. After all, they created the open society.”
These same sentiments were evident when Makhanya’s published response to President Mbeki’s letter appeared that Sunday [see image]. The mea culpa for the public works report (if that’s indeed what it was) was understated – “sometimes journalists do err – we are, after all, human” – but the general tone was unapologetic. Importantly, there was also in Makhanya’s piece the following line: “In the execution of their duties, journalists endeavour to tell the truth in its purest form, uncontaminated by agendas and malice.”
Charges of hypocrisy weren’t long in coming. Political analyst Xolela Mangcu made the point in a Business Day opinion piece that such statements create a “dangerous picture of an innocent media”, and the following week the Sunday Times letters page carried a remark that Makhanya’s “conclusion about the media and its practitioners’ sanctity is unfortunate and plain naïve.”
So given that media’s coverage of recent events like the Hefer commission and the ensuing Ngcuka row have been fraught with accusations of political partisanship, and that Makhanya’s editorships at the Mail & Guardian and the Sunday Times were integral to these events, how can he be so sure that in that time he hasn’t once spoken for some complex and hidden agenda? On the face of it, he’s not so sure. “I read the newspapers and I see that a colleague is batting for a particular faction,” he says. “Maybe people say that about my publication and I’m blind to it, but I hope not.”
Of course it is, as Makhanya readily admits, an editor’s job not to be blind to such things. And it’s also the editor’s job to keep the circulation steady, to keep advertisers happy, to keep senior staff on board. History has shown that Johncom management isn’t scared to fire its content kings for neglecting these tasks, so Makhanya will need all the dexterity at his command if he’s to be the man steering this ship through the many rough seas ahead. Right now, he takes his leave with the words “3,5-million are waiting”.