So who is really to blame?

ENCA journalist Lindsay Dentlinger is taking flak for asking black MPs to wear masks when being interviewed, while not asking white MPs to do the same. For woke tweeps and their enemies, this is all about race. Views are entrenched about whether racism here was overt, subliminal or non-existent.

However, there is another question which has not been properly asked or answered. What is the professional role of the reporter’s seniors?

I asked a TV news executive about industry norms: surely there should be senior folks monitoring live-feed content? Surely they communicate with reporters and camera crews?

Indeed, it turns out Dentlinger would have had a producer/editor “in her ear” before, during and after the interviews. The producers (some call them content editors) help identify people to interview, and also to get their names and designations right and so on.

They call the shots.

“The producer/editor will give commands such as where to stand, how much time the reporter has left, when to link back to studio, questions to ask. And, definitely, direction and instructions, such as telling her to wear a mask, keep a distance, move a person being interviewed into the right frame and so on.

“All of us had to come up with standard operating procedures for Covid-19. For example, crew are not allowed to stand closer than 2m from a person being interviewed. And they have to use a boom mic – the longer pole-type.”

So it is possible the instruction to tell certain MPs and not others to wear a mask came from a producer. The idea may not have been Dentlinger’s.

eNCA is standing by Dentlinger. That still keeps the focus on her, rather than the producer(s), where it belongs.

Even if a producer did not give explicit instructions, producers remain responsible for content. If the reporter was practising racial discrimination, or giving the impression of doing so, the producer had the duty to stop her.

The producer could also have ensured that dodgy footage was edited. Whether or not racism was on display, you’d have to be tone deaf and blind not to see the potential reputational damage in the current climate.

Producers and editors are paid to make judgment calls. In December 2019, eNCA fired its director of news Kanthan Pillay. He showed poor judgment when, recycling a tired Churchill quip, he described a departing journalist as a rat swimming towards a sinking (SABC) ship.

In 2021, an unnamed producer seems to have gotten away with a more damaging judgment lapse.

Lapses of editorial judgment often go unpunished. Daily Maverick recently got rid of Jacques Pauw and “unpublished” a controversial column he had written about his brush with police during a drunken escapade.

Yet the column remained on Daily Maverick for a week. It had been published without being checked. So Pauw takes the blame, while those whose job it is to exercise judgment suffer no consequences.

Same pattern with the Sunday Times and David Bullard in 2008. Editors, eish.

Producers and editors are paid to make judgment calls – but lapses of editorial judgment often go unpunished.