Uncaptured: Journalistic ethics in the era

of ‘white monopoly capital’, which doesn’t want black people to prosper — when, in fact, the EFF has helped to exploit poor black people in the VBS case.

“But it’s nothing new,” he said. “There has always been a rocky relationship between politicians and journalists. It’s a difficult environment to live in.”

Jika cites as a precedent the then ANC spokesperson Jackson Mthembu’s klunky chant: “Don’t buy City Press, don’t buy!”

But a call for a boycott is a long way from a threat of bloodshed. Addressing protesters outside the Zondo commission, which is taking place in the building occupied by Tiso Blackstar, Malema made threats regarding the EFF’S fight with an alleged cabal of Minister Pravin Gordhan: “There will be casualties … there might even be a loss of life.”

Malema also made implicit threats against the so-called RDF journalists he links to Gordhan: “Attend to them decisively,” he urged EFF supporters. He covered his tracks with a little caveat: “... engage with them from a civilised point of view”.

Malema has previous when it comes to war talk. And there’s a case to be made that many journalists took too long to wake up to the toxicity of racial essentialism and “rhetorical” violence.

From the outset, the EFF was a story. Malema became an asset in the struggle against state capture. He was a juicy source, both on and off record. He rocked the musty old boat of Parliament and lit up the theatre of our politics. His broadsides against white South Africans were seen as a salutary riposte to white racism and complacency.

It is only now that he is slandering journalists and Indian South Africans that a broad media consensus is turning against him.

Financial Mail deputy editor Sikonathi Mantshantsha was one of the journalists singled out by Malema. He won himself a volley of vitriol for wryly tweeting a cellphone video, filmed from his office window, of Malema and Shivambu leaving the EFF’S Zondo commission protest in a Mercedes-benz shuttle.

But Mantshantsha scoffs at the “desperate” tactics of the EFF — and whoever else tries to scare him off. He argues that such attacks are doomed to fail and, if anything, they will sort the real journalists from the dilettantes. “Those people who will be intimidated do not belong in the newsroom in the first place,” he said.

There is a place for this brand of unflinching bravado. Mantshantsha has demonstrated resilience and investigative skill with his exposés of Gupta corruption at Eskom. Scorpio’s Van Wyk is cut from the same cloth. They are among the warrior-sleuths for whom South African politics is a Manichaean battle between the good guys and the bad guys.

There is one true and indivisible story, however complex and hard to pin down it might be. That conviction is the lifeblood of investigative journalism.

But even so, the decisions journalists make about which corner of that one, true story to attack are often — if not always — steered by their sympathies. The Bosasa (African Global Operations) and Andile Ramaphosa story has received much less coverage than the EFF and VBS story. The president later clarified that the R500000 was a donation to his campaign and not a contract with his son. He said the money would be returned to Gavin Watson, chief executive of Bosasa.

Some of that asymmetry is justifiable because the EFF’S unhinged reaction to the VBS reports has become a story in itself. Even so, there are clear signs that our press corps, on balance, is going easy on the man who wields enough power, and apparently the will, to lift South Africa from its morass.

As Jika said: “We should not be entrenching ourselves and choosing sides. There are no angels.”

When asked whether there has been a pro-ramaphosa bias across the major media platforms since his presidency began, Van Wyk bristled: “Why are we even arguing this point of ideological bias? Because of state capture. That is the root cause. [Multinational public relations company] Bell Pottinger had a game to play, classifying the media as anti-gupta, antiblack, and the ANC adopted this narrative, and the EFF took off on their own tangent.

“Of course no journalist is objective — we are all products of our society and our space. I’m a white female, 32 years old, and that has baggage. But then there’s Ranjeni Munusamy, Sikonathi Mantshantsha, Rob Rose, amabhungane, Branko Brkic. How do you get all those people into one ideological box?”

But, she added: “I don’t want Cyril to succeed. I want the country to succeed. If Cyril can make that happen, great. But he’s not above scrutiny.”

If anyone can speak from experience about the risks of following one’s political sympathies as a news journalist, it is Ranjeni Munusamy.

As the daughter of the town barber in Dannhauser, a coal-mining town in Kwazulu-natal, and granddaughter of the town barman, she grew up listening to stories, and has never stopped.

She is now a political commentator for Tiso Blackstar and a prime target for the EFF’S press-bashing efforts. But, in 2003, she lost her job at the Sunday Times and her reputation in the industry when she leaked a story to the City Press that the former head of the National Prosecuting Authority, Bulelani Ngcuka, had been investigated by ANC spooks for being an apartheidera spy. Munusamy had pitched the story to the Sunday Times, but the editors didn’t bite.

Munusamy said her sympathy for Zuma at the time was based on her experiences while covering politics in Ulundi in the mid-1990s, when it was still a war zone.

“Zuma would invite us journalists to his house in the parliamentary village and tell us his stories about the struggle,” she said. “It was so fresh then. Stories about Lusaka and Swaziland and Robben Island, stories of personal encounters that you would never hear normally.

“I remember sitting on the floor in that house, which was full of people — officials, MECS, all the journalists — and listening. It was so powerful at the time, coming from someone so essential to the ANC. That is where the relationship and the respect came from. He was very charismatic. It was a safe space to be. And it was an amazing time to be alive, during the transition. Freedom fighters were trying to find their way in the world.”

But the freedom fighter in question found the wrong way in the world. After the Ngcuka furore, Munusamy was pulled ever deeper into the Zuma vortex. First he was charged with arms-deal corruption, and she believed he was being persecuted as a rival by the Thabo Mbeki cabal. Munusamy was approached to set up a website associated with the Friends of Jacob Zuma Trust and agreed to do so, for no pay.

Then Zuma was charged with raping Fezekile “Khwezi” Kuzwayo and subsequently acquitted. It was the beginning of the erosion of her trust in Zuma, which culminated after he became president, when his corruption and incompetence finally became inescapable.

“My involvement in Zuma’s political and legal battles had damaged me so severely that I hardly recognised myself. I wanted to rebuild my life, and restore whatever I could of myself,” she wrote in the Daily Maverick in 2012, soon after she returned to full-time writing at the insistence of Brkic.

Munusamy has had to be tough to endure her ostracism as a Zuma apparatchik and then to rehabilitate herself in the public eye. But she is not too tough to reflect on why she had to grow a hard shell in the first place.

“I understand people’s dislike for me,” she said. “It’s very difficult to

How do journalists report dispassionately on an erratic and vengeful actor like the EFF, which scorns the old rules of engagement?