Journalism returns to digging and diving
Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. Investigative journalists, I mean. If nothing else, 2017 has given South African readers a glimpse of the grand old days of journalism, when Hennie Serfontein exposed the Broederbond, or when Max du Preez and Jacques Pauw exposed Vlakplaas and apartheid’s killing squads.
I always remember a debate on the Financial Times in the early ’80s, when I worked there. Should we, the question was posed, “do” investigations?
The editor at the time, Sir Fredy Fisher, was dead against it. “The problem with investigations,” he growled, “is that you can be wrong.”
That killed the debate until we hired a young Robert Peston as a reporter. Peston began writing scoops. It was intoxicating. Suddenly other newspapers were writing about what was in the Financial Times. We were on television. Once a steady ship, we became unpredictable and exciting. I’ve been thinking about those years. In 2016, we were struggling with state capture. How did the Guptas do it?
Then came The Dump. The Gupta e-mails not only revealed the extent of state capture and malfeasance in the business establishment, but may have saved South African journalism.
Investigative journalists are back. AmaBhungane has produced some amazing stories. Reporters on the Sunday Times, Business Day, the Financial Mail, The Times, News24 and Daily Maverick are rock stars.
But while the Gupta e-mails have spawned a raft of other stories and emboldened citizens to come forward and talk to writers they now know and trust, they remain what they are – a dump of information handed to the media on a plate. The journalism spawned by the e-mails is best measured by the intelligence extracted from them. The rock stars are dotjoiners and we owe them all, even though the police and prosecutors have ignored them.
But then along came Pauw (again). This old-order investigative journalist roused himself from retirement as a restaurateur in the Cape to show the youngsters what a real investigation looks like. One where you go out yourself and uncover perilous things.
His new book, The President’s Keepers, is a sensational account of the venality of power in modern SA. He has dug deep into criminal networks, into President Jacob Zuma’s taxes and into the intellectual lacuna the South African Revenue Service (SARS) has become. You don’t miss your revenue target by R51bn simply because the economy is stalling.
But while reading his book, I have been thinking again about Fisher’s reservations. I edited the Financial Mail and then Business Day for 14 years, and in all honesty, had Pauw asked me to publish the information in his book in either publication, I would have turned him down.
More fool me, I suppose. Not because editors have the right to know who any reporter’s sources are — they don’t. But they do have an obligation to be sure the information they publish has more than one source and that an effort is made to ensure the subjects of the story have had a chance to respond to it.
Pauw didn’t do that because of the risk that someone named in the book might try to interdict its publication.
So he and the publishers have taken a chance I don’t think I could have taken on a newspaper. Perhaps books are different. The fact is that for an editor, investigative journalists are bounty and nightmare — a law unto themselves.
There was a time a few years back when the investigative team at the Sunday Times threatened to resign en masse. They had leverage — News24 was keen to establish its own investigative unit for City Press and Rapport. They were persuaded to stay, not by the then Sunday Times editor Ray Hartley, who had kept the team under strict supervision, but by the then Avusa management, now long gone.
Their price was high. The tight supervision, the reporters were promised, would be relaxed. They could pick their stories. It was, in hindsight, not the best call. It put Hartley’s successor, Phylicia Oppelt, in an extremely difficult position.
Pauw’s book can reasonably be measured not only by the courage and brilliance he brought to it, but also by his decision not to double-check what his sources told him.
It is a Big Thing. The book will set new standards for younger journalists to follow, but for me there are two lessons in it.
The first is the value of the experience Pauw obviously has. You just can’t beat experience. The second is that without corroboration, information, no matter how sensational and no matter how much we want to believe it, must always be open to counter-information.
The President’s Keepers is by now so big, it is beyond any niggle. That status is not available to young journalists starting out on the path Pauw, Du Preez and Serfontein created for them.
But there is another side to every story. Zuma should produce his tax returns for the first five years of his presidency, just like Barack Obama eventually had to produce his birth certificate to put Donald Trump’s story about his citizenship to rest.
And if State Security Agency boss Arthur Fraser has a problem with Pauw’s book, he should sue him, not try to shut him down.
HE AND THE PUBLISHERS HAVE TAKEN A CHANCE I DON’T THINK I COULD HAVE TAKEN ON A NEWSPAPER. PERHAPS BOOKS ARE DIFFERENT