For our editors, prevention is better than cure

OOPS! Now that the horse has bolted, we realise that we should have closed the stable door with more care. The horse this time was an unusual article in this paper on June 9 headlined “Department protesteth too much”. It was a compilation of correspondence between the newspaper and the Western Cape Education Department and Education MEC Debbie Schäfer and between the newspaper and the Press Council’s Public Advocate and Ombudsman.

The article revealed the intricacies of decision-making in the newsroom and also exposed a weakness in the Press Council’s operating procedures.

It is unusual to publish a sequence of correspondence on an issue as an article in the newspaper, but this one brought out all the nuances of the debate. The Department of Education cannot now say their side of the story was not told.

Immediately after the first story in this saga was published, on June 3, the department wrote to Editor Aneez Salie complaining that it had been one-sided, quoting only a person who differed with the MEC on tackling vandalism at schools in the poorer parts of the province.

The MEC alleged that information she had given the reporter had been ignored.

This complaint was followed by internal memos between Salie and his staff and with the department, with Salie clearly trying to resolve the matter.

On June 4, Salie asked his deputy to get the opinion of the Ombudsman on the dispute.

This was not unusual: from the time I joined the Press Council in 2007 to date, editors who are in doubt about stories they were about to publish have approached the Press Council, as the custodian of the South African Press Code, for advice on such stories. We have always obliged because it is better to prevent violations of good ethics rather than have to adjudicate when there is already a complaint about a published story.

We and the editors who asked for this advice understood it to be off the record because it was not given after a thorough examination of all the evidence from all concerned.

The lawyers would say it was given without prejudice. This time, however, the warning bells should have started ringing for us immediately we saw the date of the story we were commenting on. It was a story that had already been published and that could be the subject of a complaint to our office. We should have declined to comment.

The second mistake we made was not to spell out to the Cape Times that our opinion was off the record. We assumed the Cape Times would treat it as such. And so correspondence from the Public Advocate and the Ombudsman in the Press Council was added to the compilation.

We have learnt our lesson – we will now close the stable door firmly and carefully. In future, the Public Advocate and the Ombudsman will not dispense advice because they are directly involved in resolving disputes between complainants and publications, but the office of the executive director, that is at arm’s length from the adjudication, will be responsible for this part of our work.

We will continue to encourage editors who have doubts about stories they are about to publish to continue using our services because we believe prevention is better than cure.

The Cape Times apologises to the office of the Press Ombudsman for the misunderstanding. Our intention was to put ourselves to the test, not to bedevil the work of the Ombud’s office, which we hold in the highest esteem. – Editor