Picking over the bones
Anton Harber revisits state capture and journalism
‘Love affair rocks SARS” was the Sunday Times headline on 10 August 2014. “An ill-advised tryst gone sour has turned the heat on [South African Revenue Service] enforcement head Johann van Loggerenberg,” the article said. His relationship with Belinda Walter, described as “a Pretoria-based tobacco lawyer”, had “ended acrimoniously and the sensational accusations emerging in the fallout appear to have sparked inquiries from the Hawks crime-fighting unit, state intelligence and the police”.
That was one way to tell the story.
Another, based on the same facts in the hands of the reporters, could have been headlined “State spies and tobacco tax dodgers in campaign to smear SARS” and “SARS charges that illicit cigarette sellers using honeypots, subterfuge and smears in war against tax collector”.
This is a stark example of how journalists can frame a story to mean something quite different, how the choice of angle, headline, wording and quotation can be used to have an entirely different impact. It’s in those choices that journalists exercise their power and influence. When you’re looking for a nifty description, do you call the tobacco industry a “giant taxpayer” or a “shady tax evader”, as both are true? Do you label the tax office one of the world’s most effective, or a powerful institution overreaching and abusing that power, as there was evidence for both of these claims?
Do you call Walter a lawyer, an industry lobbyist, a spy, a serial fantasist or a honeypot, as she appeared to be all this and more? Do you portray Van Loggerenberg as a highly effective investigator, an obsessive workaholic who pushed the boundaries of legality, or a hapless romantic who fell in love with the wrong woman? Do you highlight the love affair, or the bid to undermine the tax office?
Which sources do you give credibility to, and which do you downplay? Do you put this story on the front page, indicating that it’s a major national scandal, or inside, where it’s treated as a juicy and intriguing tale of shenanigans in an institution we all love to hate?
There was no mention in the Sunday Times story that Walter had previously admitted to lying to the paper or that she’d twice changed her story. The story did, however, carry warnings from Van Loggerenberg and SARS itself that the newspaper was being used by those who were threatened by SARS’s investigations. Van Loggerenberg called it a campaign “driven by people who would benefit from him being sidelined at the tax authority”. SARS itself was more explicit: this was part of an “attack on the tax authority — driven by key players in the highly lucrative world of illicit tobacco smuggling”.
At the end of the report, the Sunday Times threw in, as if in afterthought: “The saga threatens to blow the lid on far deeper networks of misinformation and dirty dealings that have been established to prop up and protect one of South Africa’s largest criminal industries.”
This was a semi-concealed, down-story admission that they were aware of a meta-story of misinformation behind the raw sex saga. They stated clearly as a fact, not as allegation or speculation, that the tobacco industry was full of crooks involved in a dirty campaign against SARS — but the reader had to turn to page five and the end of the story to see just a hint that the story shouldn’t be taken at face value.
It was as if, under pressure to produce a good headline, the journalists had managed to sneak in recognition that they knew there was more to this story, that it wasn’t just a steamy love affair gone wrong.
Each of these elements of the story was the result of one of the many small decisions a journalist has to make at every stage of the news-gathering process to shape the narrative and what impact it will have. The good journalist makes these choices consciously, aware of the responsibility of each of these decisions.
We do what we can to find an appropriate balance between impact and nuance, accuracy and simplicity, readability and complexity, and usually have to stack the commercial interest of our outlets against the public interest served by getting the information out. We often have to balance our personal values against those of the institutions that pay us to do the work.
And we balance the ethical and the legal against the public’s hunger for voyeurism. We crave an audience as big as possible, but we want also to be believed and trusted. And we do it under considerable deadline pressure.
In reality, our task most of the time is to find a workable balance between these conflicting demands. We work within the bounds of the possible based on what information we can get, what we can do with it, and how we can get it into the public arena — and this involves compromises and tough decisions all along the way.
Certainly, we work within a commercial newsroom framework that determines some fundamentals: our choices may be overridden by those with more power, so the individual journalist might have less control over the use of their story than they would like; the format requires an 800-word piece with a pithy, eye-grabbing headline, so nuance and complexity can quickly get pushed aside.
And the Sunday Times culture and practice favoured unequivocal assertions, one single firm narrative, and gave the minimum of space and prominence to any contestation of that narrative.
The reporter’s priority might have been, at best, to capture the story as fully and accurately as possible, but the editor’s was to make the story easy to understand and attention-grabbing.
Editors in particular also have to keep an eye out for potential blowback from lawyers, readers, subjects or advertisers. The substance of the editor’s role is to balance these conflicting pressures in a way that still produces an interesting — and, hopefully, accurate — product.
All journalism in an open society is about finding a balance between good reporting and popular journalism. The good editor is the one who can achieve both. The genius editor is the one who can achieve both at the same time.
Editing is a tough job done under pressure, and few are those who do it well.
The choice of angle, headline and quotation can be used to have an entirely different impact. It’s in those choices that journalists exercise their power
We balance the ethical and the legal against the public’s hunger for voyeurism. We crave an audience as big as possible, but we want also to be believed