Clean up our newsrooms fast

From: The Media Online:09 November 2010

In the debates about the ANC’s proposal for a statutory media appeals tribunal, a lot has been said about the self-regulatory ethics regime for the press. Whether the press Ombudsman is biased in favour of the journalistic profession, as the ANC claims, or not, could be easily established from an analysis of his rulings. But if we want to know if the self-regulatory system works, the question isn’t one of bias; it is whether the system has resulted in a better press. And the answer, is, sadly, no.

That is not to say we have a bad press. Much of the day-to-day news coverage is competent, and some of our newspapers have shown themselves to be capable of great journalism in the public interest. Our newspapers are nowhere near as bad as the ANC supposes (“a cursory scan of the print media,” says the party’s discussion document on the media, “reveals an astonishing degree of dishonesty, lack of professional integrity and lack of independence”) and recent investments in training and investigative journalism by the three major newspaper groups are positive signs. But that cannot immediately undo the systematic bleeding of editorial resources that has taken place over the past two decades. Newsroom staffs have been reduced and juniorised, while the workload of underpaid and inexperienced reporters and sub-editors increased in this age of convergence. And it shows.

Two pernicious problems, in particular, bedevil South African journalism.

First, the spectre of “brown envelope” journalism had to be laid to rest. The admission by a Cape Argus reporter that he took money from an ANC politician to discredit the politician’s opponents remains, as journalism educator Professor Anton Harber said in a recent column, a dark stain on our journalism. There is no evidence that this kind of corruption is widespread in South African journalism, as the ANC implies in its discussion document. And it is true that the Cape Argus and its editors emerged from this episode with credit, having investigated the affair when it first came to light, acted as far as they could against the journalists involved, and shared the information with its readers.

But there has been a similar case before: that of former City Press editor Vusi Mona, who ran a public relations agency on the side and benefited from contracts awarded by politicians he favoured in his paper’s coverage. Mona was fired. And it has to be remembered that Smith and Mona were senior journalists at major metropolitan newspapers, relatively well-paid and with good career prospects. If they could be corrupted, is it unreasonable to suppose that others, less well paid, perhaps at lower profile media organisations, would be immune to temptation?

As the experience of some other African countries has shown, once brown envelope journalism becomes institutionalised, it is extremely difficult to eradicate.  Media owners and editors have to ensure that their house is in order. Another revelation of corruption could deal their credibility a mortal blow. They can begin by doing something about the “freebie” culture which pervades our journalism and that has already corrupted genres such as travel and motoring journalism. I am not saying that every motoring or travel writer is corrupt, but accepting an all-expenses-paid overseas trip or a “long-term test car” from a corporate benefactor while protesting that your integrity remains untarnished is no different from Tony Yengeni accepting the gift of a Mercedes-Benz from a company tendering for an arms contract and justifying it by saying he did nothing to influence the tender process. Journalists, just like politicians, have to realise: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. To quote Harber again: the path to brown envelopes is strewn with gifts and freebies.

Second, editors need to act now to stop the overuse of anonymous sources, especially in political reporting.  Journalists cannot always avoid using anonymous sources, and they are the lifeblood of investigate reporting. But they can also undermine the credibility of a news report, because readers can’t evaluate the trustworthiness of a source they can’t identify. Worse, they raise suspicions that the journalist is simply inventing anonymous sources in order give his own opinion: how many of the “insiders”, “analysts”, and “sources close to ...” that litter our news reports really exist? And then there is the ever-present danger of giving someone a platform to launch an assault against a rival under a cloak of anonymity, or that the journalist ends up being used by the source, rather than the other way round. This is what lies behind much of the resentment of some ANC leaders about what they perceive as unethical journalism, and let’s be honest: in some cases, they are justified.

The South African National Editors Forum has strict guidelines for the use of anonymous sources, but news organisations seem to ignore them. It is time to include those rules in the Press Code of Conduct and to enforce them.

Now, more than ever, when we are facing grave threats to media freedom, we need a good press. And good journalism is ethical journalism. Ethical lapses undermine the credibility of the press and give politicians ammunition to use against us. We cannot afford that.

Robert Brand teaches media ethics at the School of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University.

Source: The Media Online

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