Black marks on its name that a media icon has yet to properly erase
Any newspaper lives or dies on its reputation for credibility — and despite the apologies, the Sunday Times still has much to do to restore its own
● South Africans who lived under apartheid will remember a time when newspapers needed a government licence to publish. The licence was a statutory requirement, issued with strict conditions and at the apartheid regime’s discretion, in terms of the Newspaper and Imprint Registration Act.
Without a licence, you couldn’t publish — unless you wanted to go to jail.
These days, newspaper publishers no longer need a government licence. The Newspaper and Imprint Registration Act was torn up along with most other apartheid legislation, and freedom of the press now belongs to anyone who owns one.
What does exist, though, is a newspaper’s “social licence” — in other words, acceptance by society of the integrity of its product, built on concepts such as fairness, accuracy, truth and the facts.
Unfortunately, these concepts seem to have been temporarily abandoned by the Sunday Times at key moments between 2011 and 2015.
As a result, a few years later — with new editorial leadership — the newspaper’s social licence is under severe threat.
The recent revelations of fatal flaws in coverage of the SA Revenue Service “rogue unit”, the Cato Manor police “death squad” and the Zimbabwe “renditions” have seriously dented the newspaper’s credibility, and no doubt made many readers question whether they can believe (and trust) its contents.
As a result, the Sunday Times’s integrity is on trial. You need integrity and legitimacy to earn your social licence. And if you lose social legitimacy, you may lose your social licence.
People may stop buying the Sunday Times. Some may call for it to be boycotted. Others may keep buying it, but doubt its contents.
The apologies for the coverage that editor Bongani Siqoko has published have been courageous, particularly given that he was not even working at the newspaper when these stories were published.
But the “tainted scoops” display a disturbing pattern: they were not merely small factual errors requiring correction.
The Sars articles, in particular, were orchestrated smear campaigns — manipulation of news, through the manipulation of journalists, resulting in a complete misrepresentation of the facts. They were targeted at a particular group of people, with the aim of getting them out of the way so that state capture could progress.
People’s lives were ruined in the process. Just ask former Sars strategist Pete Richer, who confronted former Sunday Times reporter Stephan Hofstatter at the Johannesburg launch of his book Licence to Loot: “I lost my job at Sars. You set up scurrilous, unethical journalists to set up a fiction to get rid of hard-working civil servants. And you relied on information given to you by a smuggler of rhino horns.”
Whether Hofstatter and his colleague Mzilikazi wa Afrika were fed information by the police crime intelligence section — a key part of the state-capture machinery — remains to be explained.
But when you look at the impact of their reportage on Sars and the consequences of the Cato Manor and Zimbabwe rendition articles, it is very tempting to say the Sunday Times investigative unit was “captured” by the same people involved in the capture of our state.
The key question now is how the Sunday Times frees itself from the perception that it has been played, and begins to rebuild public trust and confidence.
There are a few issues the leadership of the Sunday Times needs to address if it is to do so.
Hofstatter left the Sunday Times in 2016 and has since been working at Business Day and the Financial Mail. In his latest apology, Siqoko said Wa Afrika had “left the newspaper”.
This is not enough. Corporates that collaborated in state capture have been severely criticised by journalists for running internal investigations and providing soft landings for those who collaborated in state capture. Has the Sunday Times done the same?
The investigative unit has been disbanded and its members have left the paper. But what about the others? It is common knowledge that the investigative unit members were not the only ones involved in writing and/or editing the material. What do the other journalists and editors who still work at Tiso Blackstar have to say? What does Tiso Blackstar have to say? Were they innocent — or complicit? And are they being protected?
Transparency is crucial — the Sunday Times has been quite explicit about how it was misled into producing fake news, and it is pretty clear whose interests were served by the hate campaign launched against Richer, Ivan Pillay, Johann van Loggerenberg, Anwar Dramat, Johan Booysen and others.
But what does the editor mean when he refers to a “parallel political project”? Who is he talking about? What did they do? Why did the journalists agree to it?
Readers need more information if they are to fully accept the apology.
Accountability is essential — institutions such as the Zondo commission provide a platform for public accountability, and if there is a suspicion within the Sunday Times that it was “used” as part of the state capture process, then its leadership should testify at this inquiry.
An ethics overhaul is needed: checks and balances clearly need to be strengthened. This requires acknowledging that existing codes of conduct and ethics are insufficient, and that neither the Sunday Times nor the South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) has done enough over the years to entrench the importance of ethical conduct.
This isn’t news. Myself and others have consistently pointed out that there’s more than one bent moral compass in South African newsrooms.
“Brown envelopes” have been written about extensively since 2010, but there has been insufficient internalisation of the problem, and Sanef has been asleep at the wheel through a significant ethical crisis — finally waking up this week when the Sunday Times’s credibility crisis reached a tipping point.
But this is no time for “I told you so”. It’s a time for the media profession — and the Sunday Times in particular — to make some hard decisions on whether it wants to maintain its social licence, in a time of fake news and plenty of free news.
It is not enough to talk about a commitment to truth and accuracy, independence or fact-checking. Clearly the Sunday Times needs to find a way to police and enforce this.
In the same way, declarations of interest should be compulsory, and be regularly scrutinised.
A firm signal must be sent that there is a new approach to conflicts of interest and ethical violations — a communique to staff, for example, that declares an amnesty on past misconduct and gives an opportunity for confessions, along with a free pass out of the building.
Apologies are embarrassing. But what’s most embarrassing, and much more damaging to one’s social licence, is being seen to do nothing about what caused the problem, or not telling the truth about how the truth was compromised in the first place.