Dear readers,
Newspapers in South Africa
are notorious for the sickening way they deal with apologies as the country’s
former cricket captain Greame “Biff” Smith has just found out - firsthand.
They can blacken somebody’s
name by making a story a lot more scandalous than it actually is. Worse still in
this technological age it can be picked up by other publications and blogs and
in a flash it is all around the world.
You would think
that the South African Press Ombudsman Johan Retief was there to stop this kind
of injustice. You would be wrong, he’s actually the kingpin in a window
dressing charade designed to give the impression that everything is being done
to stop the papers publishing lies about people.
It’s a cosy
arrangement that has the press not only policing itself but judging it as well.
He’s
effectively the judge appointed by the Press Council that is set up and paid
for by the media to allegedly keep its house in order.
The Smith case, which I believe is typical of a lot of
others, revealed how well or badly the system works depending which side you
are on.
In 2003 Graeme Smith was at 22 South Africa’s
youngest captain of the Proteas as the South African cricket team is called. Last
year he shocked the cricketing world by announcing his retirement after
representing his country in 117 test matches 109 of these as captain which is a
world record. He was also the skipper for 53 tests wins, another world best.
A dogged opening batsman he set numerous other records as a player.
His nickname Biff is derived from Buffel, the Afrikaans word for Buffalo.
On March 8 in a front page lead loaded
with sensationalism the Sunday Times cleaned bowled Biff’s impressive reputation.
The story was splashed across the front page under the huge headlines: Divorce
by SMS: How Biff lied to his wife – Friends reveal shocking details of Graeme Smith’s secret plans to end marriage.
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| SMITH AND HIS FAMILY IN HAPPIER TIMES |
This quoted “friends” of Smith’s wife
Morgan Deane as having said that he mistakenly sent her an SMS saying he was
filing for divorce and that he had lied because he had previously told her he had
arranged for them to have marriage counselling.
The knife was plunged deeper on Page 2
entitled: Biff lied to his wife about secret divorce plan.
On Page 20 it belittled him further by
naming him its Mampara (South African
slang for a fool or idiot) of the Week with
the heading: Caught in his own slips.
Readers were told “as fact” that Smith had sent the
controversial SMS to his wife by mistake as it was meant for his attorney.
The posters proclaimed: Greame Smith’s divorce shame.
At the time the story appeared he
issued this statement: “It is disappointing that certain segments of the media
have chosen to publish speculation and accusations as regards the means and
manner of our marriage breakdown. It is tempting to respond, however other than to
deny the accusations that have been published, I have chosen not to comment.”
Subsequently when
he appealed to Retief for a review he got a typical newspaper friendly response.
The Ombudsman directed that the Sunday
Times had to “apologise to Smith for stating the allegations (that he advised
Deane via SMS that he was getting a divorce, that he lied to her and that he
had a secret divorce plan) as fact in headlines, in Twitter and in Mampara of the Week and for suggesting
without supporting evidence some
wrong-doing on Smith’s part by the wording of the posters – thereby
unnecessarily harming his dignity and reputation.”
He ordered the Sunday Times to print a
“short apology on the front page immediately below its masthead containing the
words ‘apology’ or ‘apologises’ (or something
to that effect) and Smith’s name in the headline.”
For a press ombudsman
his ruling was hardly precise.
He added that there must be a “full
apology on Page 2.” The words “Visit www.presscouncil.org.za for the full
finding” had to be at the end of the text and the “full apology” had to be on
the Sunday Times website “if the offending headlines were published there as
well.”
Surely
Retief could have easily established if the headlines were published on the website.
As it turned out he let the Sunday
Times off the hook almost completely
by allowing it to publish a minute apology that was a fraction of the size of
the original story. There was nothing on Page 2.
 |
IF YOU CAN SEE IT THE APOLOGY IS ON THE RIGHT
whereas the original story was on the left with an even bigger
headline than the SARS one here |
When I asked him why this was he
replied: “The idea was to have a kicker on Page 1, referring to the apology on
Page 2.”
So
if he had had his way the apology would not have even been on Page 1.
“However,” he went on, “the newspaper
offered to publish the full apology on Page 1 which made text on Page 2
redundant.”
What about the offending posters? My
bet is that there were never any posters announcing the apology.
I asked Retief why the Press Council
did not make newspapers print apologies in the same position as the original
story and with the same prominence.
It’s
hardly surprising that the Council has that covered in favour of the media with
a Complaints Procedure that
according to Retief “asks for appropriate prominence.”
Appropriate for whom? An apology that is a fraction the size of the original
story with a tiny heading would I am sure not be “appropriate” in Smith’s eyes.
The word is defined as being “suitable
or proper in the circumstances.” Only Retief and the Sunday Times would agree
that the apology in this case complied
with this definition.
In this part of his finding which the
Sunday Times readers could only see on the Press Council’s website Retief
concluded: “By making a decision that the publication of the headlines/Twitter
was unjustified, I am not finding that the allegations made against Smith are
false. For all I know they may be true. I simply do not have any evidence to
either effect, besides, the Press Ombudsman’s office is not a court of law – it
is an institution of ethics. My decision is therefore not a judicial, but rather
a journalist one.
“All I’m saying is that, with the
information at the newspaper’s disposal at the time of publication, it was not
justified in stating the allegations as fact in the headlines and in the
Twitter feed.”
How
ethical is it to allow the paper to get away with such a tiny apology. And if
he did not know if the allegations were true or false how could Retief possibly say
that he knew what information the Sunday Times had at its “disposal at the time
of publication.”
Retief’s full judgement contained some very confusing statements as well as this odd
throw away line: “I have on various occasions stated that the mere fact that an
allegation has been made does not by default justify a newspaper to publish it
– allegations can be baseless, defamatory and they can cause huge unnecessary
harm. Be that as it may.”
“The report consistently ascribes
those allegations to ‘friends,’” he continued. “It is clear that the allegations,
whether factually correct or not were the views of people.”
He
referred to Section 4.7 of the Press Code that states: “The dignity or
reputation of an individual should be overridden only by a legitimate public
interest if the facts reported are true or substantially true.”
Having concluded that the Sunday Times
report was based on allegations from
an anonymous source he made no ruling about the report itself even though his
own findings showed that it should not have been published at all. This was in
spite of the fact that he had “little doubt” that it had “done unnecessary harm”
to Smith’s “dignity and reputation.”
Retief’s admission that his decisions
are “journalistic ones” explains exactly why the Press Council has a
Constitution that is loaded in favour of the newspapers it claims to police.
Is
it a conscience-salving new twist to have the Council’s web address included in
the apology which was a cop out for what should have been a punishment of some significance by being in the paper itself?
The Press Council is a toothless media
lap dog that has only one way of punishing transgressing publications and that
is to order them to print the kind of pathetic apology the Sunday Times was
told to carry.
By coincidence the African National
Congress (ANC) Government has revived its call for a statutory Media Appeals
Tribunal that would be able to fine offending papers and perhaps meet out even
harsher sanctions.
A couple of years ago the papers in
the Sunday Times group had Thabo Leshilo a veteran journalist and former editor
as their own internal Ombudsman or Public Editor as he was called to act as the
readers’ representative..
He was there when the ANC first mooted
the idea of a Media Appeals Tribunal. Possibly because of this he advocated
in one of his columns that apologies should be on the same page as the original
story and just as prominent.
“This
if followed should go a long way to addressing most of the legitimate
criticisms of our newspapers and improve their credibility,” he wrote.
You can imagine how popular that was.
So shortly afterwards he disappeared and was replaced in 2011 by another former
editor Joe Latakgomo. He too did not
last long and was not replaced when he left.
The hierarchy at that newspaper group
evidently decided that the Press Council was more than enough to contend with,
without having its own Ombudsman coming
up with embarrassing, reader friendly bright ideas.
In its quest for reader grabbing
sensationalism did the Sunday Times overstep the mark again in its very next
edition following the one with the Smith apology. On May 24 its front page lead
was headed: Trevor Noah’s family tragedy
with the subtitled: Yet another female
relative killed.
The story was about the funeral of
South African comedian Noah’s 24
year old cousin who was murdered. Noah and the girl were not close, the paper
reported as they lived in different provinces, according to his grandmother,
but they knew each other.
The strangest part of the story was
that the paper claimed the girl’s relatives had not yet been able to tell Noah
about the girl’s death and the Sunday Times had been unable to contact him for
comment as he was abroad.
It got stranger still when Noah tweeted:
He
followed this with:
Then News 24 reported that the Sunday
Times Editor Phylicia Oppelt was standing by her paper’s report while at the
same time it claimed to have spoken to Noah’s 88 year old grandmother who
rubbished the Sunday story as being completely
untrue.
Even The Times, the daily in the same
stable as the Sunday Times was ominously silent on the subject in the following days.
Now that Noah has really hit the big
time by being named the successor to Jon Stewart on the The Daily Show, the American late night TV news satire his name is
a huge draw to have in any newspaper headline.
Could this have been the main motive
for the Sunday Times story?
It
will be interesting to see what Retief decides if he gets a complaint about this one.
A WEEK LATER ON MAY 31
Having been quoted earlier as standing by her paper's Noah report of May 24 the Sunday Times Editor Phylicia Oppelt came up with this wishy-washy apology that took up nearly half of Page 4.
"Clearly we had not delved down into the facts as deeply as we should," she wrote. "On reflection should this story have been offered to readers in the condition that it was? No.
"Was it sufficiently weighty to be offered as the main story on our front page? No."
Nowhere in her long winded explanation of why her paper got it wrong did she mention the one aspect that was the key to getting it right. And that was to get Noah's view before the story was published - one of the basics of good journalism that every cub reporter is taught.
But when the Sunday Times could not get hold him it couldn't wait to get into print as if this was a world shattering scoop. The result was that Oppelt had egg on her face two weeks running.
In typical newspaper style the headline for her apology was an innocuous one design to disguise what really happened.
It would have been too daring for it to have said something like: Sorry we got our Trevor Noah 'family tragedy' story wrong. Here's how it came about.
Regards,
Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman,
who tells you what the main stream media would rather keep mum about.
