/ 3 May 2013

Political journalism: Hard evidence often eludes the truth

About 75% of workers earned an average of R3 300
About 75% of workers earned an average of R3 300

Ordinarily, with the country generally stable politically, the political reporter should be relatively insignificant. All our democratic institutions are in place, the bitter succession wars in the ANC are ostensibly over, Jacob Zuma is in power without the country collapsing, the opposition is yapping from the sidelines, as it customarily does, and the ANC assured of at least one more term in power – it's just another year in South African politics.

You wouldn't think so, though, if you saw how threatened our politicians are by reporters. And you would be wondering why, instead of engaging with them, these politicians spend so much time trying to discredit the journalists' work and their professionalism.

The endless sequence of statements refuting stories that they should have responded to in the first place is just mind-boggling. But that is our world today.

It was in political reporting that I first encountered the concepts of "kite flying" (using the media to throw something into the public space so you can gauge the reaction), "muddying the waters" and the "sustained" media "campaign" – something we routinely are accused of.

Other traps facing us include prevarication, selling us dummy stories, doublespeak, bare-faced denials and blatant lying.

Common cause
The journalist's work has become even harder as the phenomenon of the anonymous source has emerged and become more important in political reporting. It first came about because politicians in parties who felt strongly about the outcome of internal processes felt the need to share their information with the media without exposing themselves to party sanction.

When the Mail & Guardian first reported that the Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi was being investigated on "corruption" charges, we came under a huge amount of pressure – denials flew left, right and centre. We were caught on the back foot because we could not produce independent "evidence", even though we knew precisely who was carrying out the investigation into Vavi and what the terms of reference were.

The existence of that investigation is now common cause. Leaders of Cosatu affiliates confirm it openly. The National Union of Mineworkers' provincial leader, Madoda Sambatha, confirmed it live on TV last week, despite the fact that Cosatu is officially still referring to it as "internal processes" and not an "investigation".

This is just one story in which ethical considerations caused us to tread carefully, yet it is also a story in which the truth is slowly being revealed. The Cosatu battles are being played out in the open but you can't write a word about them without being accused of planting divisions and of fabricating lies in order to assassinate the characters of certain leaders.

The Cosatu leadership would like us to write blandly that there are "processes unfolding" in the labour federation.

And it becomes even more complex. Take the case in which we know the insights and decisions of a meeting before it gets officially communicated but obviously we don't have an electronic recording of the meeting – which would be the most solid evidence. Politicians expect us to keep our silence for as long as we cannot produce recordings, but I aver that there would be no political reporting if we were to follow the dictates of such politicians about what is appropriate and acceptable to them.

Very often we have the minutes of a meeting and we contact the party for comment – and they deny their own minutes.

Comeback politician
These challenges are the ones that result in the kind of situations the M&G ombudsman Franz Kruger mentioned in his column in these pages last week, including the case of running an analysis piece about a situation in which it is not obvious that the central facts have been established. As he said, do we then just ask the readers to trust our word for it?

These are just some of the dilemmas we political journalists face. Poli­ticians are asking us not to apply our minds; they essentially want us to report verbatim whatever they say and not question or contextualise it.

Recently we wrote that the ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe's proposals to the party's national executive on the future of the youth league had been rejected. Subsequently we received (and published) a reply from Mantashe, as well as a long letter from the former Reserve Bank governor Tito Mboweni purporting to educate us on political processes, although the substance of it was that Mantashe's proposals were a collective proposal and not an individual one.

I felt the more Mboweni clarified what actually happened at the meeting the more he confirmed what we had heard from several anonymous sources. We were puzzled about the motive for his letter so we will be watching to see what happens to this comeback politician.

Where I agree with Mboweni is that the M&G belongs to its readers; we are here to serve them. But we serve them best when we go beyond the surface stuff, resist the pressure to regurgitate political slogans and reveal what the truth really is and what it really means.

The reality is that there is no one truth about the ANC, the Democratic Alliance or any other party. They are, at all times, dynamic and contested spaces and we reflect the varying positions, interests and postures in that space.

I would agree with the veteran Time journalist Henry Grunwald, who before his death in 2005 wrote of our shared profession: "Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air."