HOW THE SUNDAY TIME'S MORAL STANDING KEEPS DROPPING

Dear Bongani Siqoko Editor of the SundayTimes,

Anton Harber, journalism
professor

            You began you tenure in the hot seat in 2016 with a whole page apology for the lies your paper had been telling about the so called “rogue unit” at the South African Revenue Service (SARS). Alright I accept that this did not happen under your watch, but that did not excuse it.(lotto journalism)

            It clearly caused the downfall of your predecessor Phylicia Oppelt, who suddenly disappeared never to be heard of again?

            Subsequently I revealed that your Johannesburg based paper was once again employing Jim Jones, a known thief, as a freelance writer for your business section (Business Times). And when I asked you to undertake that this would never happen again you didn’t even have the courtesy to reply. (love affair with a crook)

            The latest serious indictment of your paper’s integrity has just appeared in your 28 January edition.

            A whole page (you never do these things by halves) on Cape Town’s drought problems headed Special Feature gave no hint to your readers that it was in fact a Department of Water Affairs advertisement paid for with the taxes of many of your readers. You hoodwinked them completely.

            The way it was written could not have given anyone the impression that it was anything else other than a genuine Sunday Times report by one of your journalists.

            What else would they have thought when they read “Another document given to the Sunday Times” etc?

            It was a huge puff for the African National Congress (ANC) government’s Minister of Water and Sanitation, Nomvula Mokonyane.  As you know the national government is mandated to supply bulk water to the provinces which then have to distribute it.

            The issue is complicated because both the Western Cape Province and Cape Town are led by the Democratic Alliance (DA), much to the annoyance of the ANC.

            This advertisement in editorial clothing blamed the DA for “typically being at loggerheads with the ANC-led national Department of Water and Sanitation.” Above this the headline had another dig at the DA with “Water Minister tells DA finger-pointers to dry up.”

            While your paper was deceiving its readers with this no doubt very expensive (a couple of million at a guess) addition to your coffers, the worried people of Cape Town were holding thumbs that the projected April Day Zero, when the taps are scheduled to run dry, will not materialise.

            In the Daily Maverick Anton Harber slammed the paper you head for its deceit with some very strong language. And if anybody should know about newspaper ethics he should as the Caxton Professor of Journalism at Wits University.

            He wrote that your paper contravened “every principle of journalism, every code of conduct.” It could not get much worse than that yet he added that by not saying the page was sponsored it was a “dangerously misleading, politically-laden, one-sided, unfiltered opinion.”

Bongani Siqoko

            Asked for an explanation you did what so many of our political heads have been doing lately when grilled at various inquiries. Somebody else did it. The page was changed without your knowledge, you told Harber.

            You’ve got no excuse now. Unlike the “rogue unit” series this one happened when you were well and truly established in the editor’s chair

            Getting back to the edition of your paper that started this latest controversy it would seem that you are completely oblivious to threats to newspapers from social media and the internet. Finding something new for readers must be a nightmare for daily papers and even harder for ones like yours that only appear once a week.

            Surely that must make it even more imperative that your staff make a much greater effort to come up with something off beat so that as much as possible of your paper is not old hat when people get it on Sunday.

            There were 28 pages in the main part of the edition I am referring to and of these three were devoted to the Cape Town water crisis that had already been done to death for weeks. To compound this overkill the page that followed that controversial advertisement was broadly speaking an echo of the advertisement, this time as an actual report by your staff member Bobby Jordan. He presumably did not know about the skulduggery behind the “Urgent plans to avoid Day Zero” spread opposite his contribution.

            Then you also totally over did it with tributes to jazz great Hugh Masekela that took up the whole of pages 3, 15 and 16. He died on the Tuesday in the week that your paper was published so by the time the Sunday Times came out there must have been very little that had not yet been said about him in all forms of the media.

            Even your front page lead about how the Gupta brothers milked R220-million of government money earmarked to upgrade poor farmers in a dairy project had a touch of “Oh not that again”.

Mzilikazi wa Africa

            That too highlighted your paper’s dubious morality. Among the three names in the byline (using more than one journo to write so many of your stories shows a lack of confidence in their abilities and is tailor made for mistakes with one blaming the other) was that of Mzilikazi wa Africa, who was so discredited in Jacques Pauw’s  book The President’s Keepers.

            He was one of your three ace investigative reporters responsible for that SARS “rogue unit” fiasco that Pauw blamed for “helping Zuma’s keepers to destroy the finest law enforcement institution in the country.” (sources dilemma)

            In spite of this he is still on your investigative team apparently. He is the only one of the three still working for you. Like continuing to employ Jim Jones this shows your paper’s total lack of any acceptable standard which can only lead to more apologies and more people wondering if your paper is worth buying.

            As the old saying goes: You get judged by the company you keep.

            Your sister paper The Times that kept your group’s flag flying during the week was recently dumped in the rubbish bin as rising costs forced it to go digital. Do you know how well that’s doing now because I can not afford a lawyer to go on reading it? (online shocker)
            Could your paper be going the same way? Do you think that repeating stories that most people have already heard with hardly any new angle is the best recipe for selling newspapers in this digital age, when virtually everybody can be a reporter or a photographer and have their work sent around the world in seconds.

            Also if people lose faith in your paper’s ability to tell the truth what’s left? Fake news might keep you going, but not for long unless you happen to be Donald Trump.

            Regards,

            Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman who once worked for the Sunday Times in the days when the editor had this old fashioned idea: You got fired if you spiced up an expose` with fiction.

            

PRESS COUNCIL'S SPECIAL PROTECTION FOR MEDIA LIES

Dear Newspaper Readers,

Susan Smuts

          Lies, lies and more lies in a newspaper puff for itself are perfectly acceptable if they are classed as “comment” according to the Code of Conduct of the South African Press Council

          This was what Susan Smuts, acting on behalf the Johannesburg based Sunday Times, relied upon after I complained to the Press Ombudsman about an Editorial headed Our commitment to the truth is absolute published last month which contained numerous statements of fact that were not true.

          The Council has been the self regulating body for the South African Media industry for the last 40 years and as such has been far from a glowing example of how to administration the best justice. It’s hardly surprising then that its Code of Conduct has a distinct Media bias.

This is what part of the Code, which is an example of baffling muddled thinking, has to say about what it describes as Protected Comment.

          “The media shall be entitled to comment upon or criticise any actions or events of public interest. This is protected even if extreme, unjust, unbalanced, exaggerated and prejudiced, as long as it expresses an honestly-held opinion; is without malice; is on a matter of public interest; has taken fair account of all material facts that are substantially true and is presented in such a manner that it appears clearly to be comment.”

          In this case the Editorial certainly qualified as being “extreme, unjust, unbalanced, exaggerated and prejudiced.” So how can it possibly be “in the public interest” to allow this in a national Sunday paper with millions of readers. How can the Ombudsman decide if a publication is expressing “an honestly held opinion” unless he is a mind reader?     

          Another obvious flaw in the Protected Comment definition is that if an article contains those deplorable characteristics like “unjust, prejudiced” etc how can it be “without malice”?

          From my own experience I can conclusively say that the Sunday Times did not take a “fair account of all material facts” when compiling this Editorial.

          It started by referring to a particular investigation the Sunday Times had done and then went on to praise the way the paper in general had always operated with false statements such as:

1.    “We want to reassure you, our readers, and the public at large, that we adhere to and practise the highest standards of ethical and principled journalism.”

2.    “We have always (take special note of this word) been bound by a code of ethics and acted within the law, and have respected public expectations. We have been conscious of and responsive to concerns or complaints regarding anything that appears in this paper as part of our public accountability system.”

3.    “Our journalists, editors and other editorial staff are expected to - and have (another word of special note) – operated within these ethical, legal, institutional and professional bounds.”

4.    “All these form part of our values, ethos and our social contract with our readers.”

5.    “We have never abused your trust, and never will.”

6.    “We will never forget that we derive our mandate and legitimacy from this public trust. It is required of us that we exercise our power, mandate and duty with the utmost care - ethically and responsibly, holding ourselves to the same standards we expect of others.”

7.    “We constantly remind ourselves that our conduct must never be motivated or influenced by anything other than the public interest. Therefore any insinuation that we have been swayed by anything other than the public interest is baseless.”

Ironically within days of this Editorial appearing the Press Ombudsman ruled that the paper’s reports on that expose` the Editorial had referred to were “inaccurate, misleading and unfair.” This alone made nonsense of much of what was claimed in the Editorial, even if my own experiences were ignored.

          Details of these, which I listed in my complaint to the Press Ombudsman, are contained in an earlier post sunday-times-badly-needs-truth-drug.html .

          When I logged my complaint to the Council on its online form I never received anything to formally acknowledge it. About three weeks later I sent an email complaining about this to somebody called Khanyi Mndaweni who was first in the email list on the Council’s website.

Latiefa Mobara 

          A week later Latiefa Mobara replied saying she could not assist me as my complaint “did not breach any sections of the Press Code”.

She referred me to an email she had received from Susan Smuts which stated: “The complainant does not make out a case for us to answer in terms of the Press Code. The editorial, which is comment, did not deal with any of the matters he seeks to attach to it. We ask you to reject the complaint.”

Sorry Susan as most of the Editorial referred to the way your paper had always conducted itself the matters I attached to it certainly did apply. 

Neither email disclosed who these people were. I had to find out for myself. It turns out that Mobara is a former journalist who has the impressive title of Public Advocate. She has been described as the person who acts as the “eyes and ears of those who seek to rectify the injustice of false facts.”

Well she certainly made no effort to do this in my case.

From what I could make out she is the general dogsbody who sifts through complaints to make sure the Ombudsman is not unduly burdened.

Smuts on the other hand is not only the Legal Editor of the Sunday Times but is or was a Press Representative on the Council’s Panel of Adjudicators as well - higher up I assume in the Council’s chain of influence than Mobara.

Mobara didn’t even stick to the Code which was the basis for her ensuring that my complaint didn’t get as far as the Ombudsman Johan Retief.

Under a Settlement by the Public Advocate heading it states that she has to try and obtain a settlement between the parties after getting a response to the complaint from the publication concerned. If a settlement is not possible the matter has to be referred to the Ombudsman for adjudication.

But all she did was dismiss my complaint herself by accepting Smuts’ version.

How questionable is that especially in view of Smuts’ cosy connection to the Council.

The paper’s claims to have been honest forever were debunked completely in 2008. That was when its reporting standards had reached such a low ebb that it appointed a four person independent panel headed by former Mail and Guardian Editor Anton Harber to find out what was going on.

The muck ups had forced it to make embarrassing retractions in relation to some of its most sensational 2007 and 2008 stories.

The Harber Inquiry produced a long list of recommendations in an 88 page report. A 900 word summary of this appeared on the TimesLive website in December 2008, but the paper was evidently too ashamed to let us all see the entire findings.

In 2011 freelance Michelle Solomon’s Daily Maverick’s article Sunday Times and Me disclosed that even through the Promotion of Information Act she was unable to prize the full report out of Avusa, the company that owned the paper at the time and subsequently became the Times Media Group.

She began with this telling indictment of her profession:

“As a young journalist, I am still struggling to understand why there is such a gap between what we, the media, preach and what we actually do and why it is considered so natural.”

She quoted Harber, the Professor of Journalism& Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, as saying the company was “being silly” by not releasing the full report.

“The Sunday Times should set an example for the kind of openness and public accountability they expect from others,” he told her.

He added that he was disappointed that so few of the panel’s recommendations had been implemented.

He and his colleagues had to sign a confidentiality agreement before beginning their work. So from the start the Sunday Times was determined to do everything possible to ensure its dirty washing never got hung out on the line.

This is how Michelle Solomon ended her Daily Maverick
article

HOW MANY PEOPLE WHO DON’T BENEFIT FROM IT WILL AGREE THAT POLICING YOURSELF IS AN ACCEPTABLE FORM OF JUSTICE? IT’S DEPLORABLE THAT THE PRESS, WHICH IS QUICK TO TELL OTHER PEOPLE HOW TO RUN THEIR LIVES, HAS BEEN ALLOWED TO HIDE BEHIND ITS OWN SELF PROTECTION SHIELD FOR SO LONG.

This is the "judgement" I finally got from the Ombudsman Johan Retief via Mobara and my reply.
 It is similar to the brushoff I got from the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) when I
 complained about the dubious ads in The Citizen newspaper 
(http:citizens-aladdins-cave-of.html)

NO WONDER THE SOUTH AFRICAN GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN THREATENING TO APPOINT A STATUTORY MEDIA TRIBUNAL TO CONTROL THIS INDUSTRY THAT CONSIDERS ITSELF SO SPECIAL.

Regards

Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman who tells it like it is.

P.S. This entire Post of mine is PURE COMMENT, so that lets me off the hook if anything might be slightly wrong, completely wrong or has absolutely no basis at all. This is according to Paragraphs 5.1 to 20.4 of the POOR MAN’S PRESS OMBUDSMAN’S CODE OF CONDUCT.