Humanity’s last chance to keep the light of truth alive
Many of you noticed our website shutdown on 15 April and to more than 1,000 of you who signed up to become Maverick Insiders, THANK YOU! We extend the same heartfelt thanks to the businesses that contacted us with support.
You join a legion of nearly 30,000 Maverick Insiders who have supported us all these years. We can’t do this without you and we appreciate your support.
To some, it may have seemed over the top to shut Daily Maverick down for a day to convey the depth of the crisis that journalism is facing worldwide.
By all measures, we are doing better than the great majority of the news media worldwide: our audience is growing, as is the quality, depth and spectrum of our work. But make no mistake. Behind the scenes, this is a daily grind for existence – and survival.
These days, choosing to follow a true media mandate comes with a burden of pain. The financial struggles, the threats, the attacks and the derision are all part of the job. Let me assure you, it is still worth it.
However, it is a journey that is increasingly impossible to take on one’s own, no matter how successful or powerful one may be.
Daily Maverick’s shutdown was not just about saving journalism. It was about the importance of maintaining truth and trust in these increasingly anchorless days.
Defending truth
More than 10 million of you read our work every month. Every day, you trust us to look beyond the horizon for you. We see a big storm approaching us all.
Defending truth is at the centre of every functioning society. If we can’t distinguish truth from lies and reality from invention, we cannot maintain our value system. Our entire edifice will crumble, and not so slowly.
We will end up surrendering it all. No newsletters, fact-checks and reasoned words could repel the darkness that would descend upon us, should the remaining messengers of truth cease to exist.
We at Daily Maverick are doing our utmost to ensure this scenario never happens. It is often a job shared among a few – media houses and civil society organisations, heroic whistle-blowers, and individuals of great personal courage and convictions.
The odds are stacked against us. The extraordinary pace of change has erased the space for many local and national media brands that for so long provided the lifeblood for communities worldwide.
Some of those changes were due to bad business choices by media executives worldwide – who were blind to the one-in-1,000years change brought about by the internet.
Some of the decisions were made through our collective blindness to the danger of social media – which we allowed to take our audiences and revenues to a Neverland where they are not responsible for anything that is said on their platforms, and yet get to grab all the money on the table.
Perhaps the most worrying change turned out to be that some of the world’s nastiest individuals and regimes now have access to the most sophisticated weapons of info war ever made, at near-zero cost.
My invitation is to the people who really should know better to finally wake up. News articles do not appear out of thin air.
Too many people believe that genuine news media brands are “pushing agendas”.
Check the social media feeds and you will find that Daily Maverick is paid by both the ANC and the DA, that it is both supporting the billionaire class and pushing a “leftist agenda”, that it is both a Hamas and an Israeli propagandist, that it is both prosoros and a CIA weapon … the contradictions are endless. These plainly can’t all be right, but here we are.
No serious publication will ever publish articles satisfying every interest group or supporting everyone’s views 100%.
What matters is keeping the light of truth and reality on. We, as South Africa and as humanity, are close to switching that light off. When that moment happens, please do not say you were not warned.
As journalists warned when Thabo Mbeki was pushing against antiretrovirals, when the police massacred mine workers at Marikana, when Jacob Zuma put South Africa into the Guptas’ hands, when Malema & Co stole money from the poorest of the poor, when Iqbal Survé took billions in dodgy “loans” from the PIC, when Zweli Mkhize got embroiled in the Digital Vibes scandal, and so, so many other times.
Our job is to report, investigate, analyse, opine and warn. But once all the dust has settled, these are just words. Without action and reaction, they are merely black lines on our screens.
It is people who bring meaning to them. It is YOU who make these words alive.