There’s a belief that journalists, or even journalism, should never be the story and when they are, something is wrong.
I’m not sure that is always true. In some ways, journalists are like politicians, diplomats, business people, public servants or academics in that they are all like the wooden ponies on a carousel that goes around and around in a circle.
This is not to say that journalists are automata who play no active role in the stories they produce. The idea that journalists are passive and objective is really rubbish.
With the exception of cricket or football scores, there is no such thing as objective journalism. The phrase itself, as one respectable fellow said, “is a pompous contradiction in terms”.
In some ways, then, like the ponies on a carousel, journalists have their place in society, going up and down as planned, and around and around as designed. This all sounds terribly contradictory.
Sometimes journalism is on a high and at other times it’s on a low.
There’s a sense that in SA journalism is currently on a high, and that it has been pulled out of the sewers and back to respectability with enhanced credibility over the past few weeks.
Recently the commission of inquiry into allegations of state capture hailed the work of investigative journalists for exposing the ways in which the most odious characters corrupted almost every aspect of the state.
A few days ago, Sunday Times editor Bongani Siqoko demonstrated how this corruption had eaten into the credibility of his newspaper and demonstrated a process of cleaning up.
As in the way in which the state has started cleaning up its institutions, through the commission of inquiry into allegations of state capture, the Sunday Times wants to restore faith and trust by rooting out unethical conduct within its ranks. In a frank editorial published on Sunday, Siqoko wrote to readers:
“We failed you by inadvertently allowing sinister forces, who were hellbent on destroying our institutions, to abuse our trust and use some of our stories to carry out their objectives.
“We unintentionally tainted our stories by narrowly focusing our reportage on incidents without reflecting a broader picture of the factional battles and political wrangling behind the scenes, within the ANC, in the government, state institutions and law enforcement agencies,” Siqoko wrote. This is good for journalism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a prominent hold-out has been one of apartheid’s most loyal voices, Ton Vosloo, who headed Nasionale Pers and actually helped draft statements for National Party leaders during the worst years in our past.
Consistent with so many of apartheid’s old beneficiaries who are hiding in plain sight, and now claim innocence and victimhood, Vosloo would imagine that he had done nothing wrong. He was, after all, a good business person ...
In a review of Vosloo’s book, my former editor on the Weekly Mail, Anton Harber, wrote, “It was never a secret that Vosloo’s Nasionale Pers was close to the National Party government.
“The company was started in 1915 as part of the Afrikaans nationalist ‘baasskap’ project.
“Cabinet ministers sat on its board and its senior political writers attended closed party meetings ...
“He can claim much of the credit for leading the company out of its parochial, ethnocentric roots into the global giant it is today, by a long way Africa’s biggest company and still growing.”
We are expected to forget he served as a loyal apartheid servant and focus on his achievements as a businessperson.
With the freedom to speak the truth, my former editor wrote: “The gravest sin of the Afrikaans media was not what it said, but what it systematically hid from its public: the forced removals, the prison torture, the slave working conditions, the censorship, the petty segregation, the daily humiliations – all the conditions that defined apartheid and made it so horrifying to the rest of the world.
These were barely reported in his newspapers, leaving them with the legacy of having encouraged the wilful myopia and ignorance that enabled the perpetuation of the barbaric conditions of apartheid which still mark and divide our country.”
It is certainly true, as investigative journalist Jessica Bezuidenhout wrote recently, that it may not always feel like it, “but South Africa is in a better place than it was this time in 2017 – and the media played a critical role in getting the country to this point ...
“It was solid factual journalism that aided in the shift in perception among a larger segment of the public – along with the efforts of civil society constantly hammering away in a bid to expose wrongdoing – when it finally proved that the media was right all along.”
Sometimes, it is not bad for journalists and journalism to be the story. They are, after all, like those ponies on a carousel who make up all the actors and agents of society.
Sometimes they’re up and sometimes they’re down.