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.

            

JACQUES PAUW'S "SOURCES" DILEMMA

Dear Jacques,

          Congratulations on your brilliant coup. There can’t be many expose` stories that have got into book form based on the words of so many people who readers will never be able to identify.

          I was surprised that after South Africa’s biggest newspaper “sources” scandal you were still able to find a publisher to take you on because your book is absolutely littered with them.

          Hardly a page goes by in your 328 page The President’s Keepers without one of your anonymous “sources"popping up with some startling revelation or other. Alright, not all of them are that startling because they have already appeared in print elsewhere. But for those who don’t know, it makes for a riveting read.

          Your co-author Google must have been a great help because I see that slotted in between your firsthand interviews with your “sources” you have lifted the work of numerous other scribes. They evidently beat you to it by digging up the dirt on many of the characters in your book while you were sidetracked cooking for your restaurant and looking after guests at your guesthouse in Riebeek-Kasteel, wherever that is.

          You even listed them and told us “I have relied heavily on the published works of some of the country’s most distinguished journalists.” Not a bad way to start.

          Three not so distinguished ones got a terribly tongue lashing. They were involved in those disgraceful Sunday Times South African Revenue Service(SARS) “rogue unit” lies, which resulted in a whole page retraction that must have been some kind of record. You accused Piet Rampedi, Stephan Hofstatter and Mzilikazi wa Africa of “helping Zuma’s keepers to destroy the finest law enforcement institution in the country.” I gather you were referring to SARS, which up to that stage had been doing a first class job.

Pauw's three unwise men - Hofstatter, Rampedi & Wa Africa

You added that they “contributing greatly to ending the careers of dedicated civil servants,” which enabled the much maligned current SARS boss Tom Moyane to “break the tax collector.” And it was “a burden they will carry for a long time.”

In that Sunday Times apology the new Editor Bongani Siqoko wrote that one of the reasons why they got their stories so wrong was that “we overly relied on our sources.” Evidently this was too close to the bone for you because your version left out the reference to “sources.”

Your book told us merely that he told his readers that “today we admit to you that we got some things wrong.”

If the sins you credited those journos with were correct I would have expected their newspaper careers to be over, at the very least on the Sunday Times or any of the publications in the same group. 

Rampedi joined a rival paper the Sunday Independent as its senior investigative reporter. Wa Africa is still doing investigations on the Sunday Times and Hofstatter is playing a similar role on the Business Day and the Financial Mail, which like the Sunday Times are owned by the Tiso Blackstar Group (formerly Times Media).

Is it that you were not believed or that a very weak line was taken by the employers of these reporters, who were kept on or taken on in much the same way as our Government departments do with their bad eggs? Ironically these publications would no doubt be quick to castigate our rulers for the same sort of thing.

I see that when you joined Eusebius McKaiser on Radio 702 to discuss your book Hofstatter was also there and the controversial subject of “sources” came up again. You attacked him for his poor reporting on the “rogue unit” story. He retorted with the lame excuses that he was not the lead reporter on the expose` and he did not have time to check his “sources.”

In case anybody thought that the investigations of all those writers you listed were all you relied upon, you assured us that the “vast bulk of my information” came from officials and the like who spoke to you “on condition of anonymity.” Like all good journalists you told us that they will forever “remain anonymous.” You said you “honour their courage for putting their jobs on the line by divulging the dirty secrets of Jacobs Zuma’s keepers to me.”

          What’s courageous about hiding behind a “sources” shield?  How could they possibly have put their jobs on the line if nobody knew who they were?

          It wasn’t by any chance a member of your “sources” team in the State Security Agency who started that huge promotion ball rolling by announcing that they would have your guts for garters, as they used to say when I was at school, if you and your publisher Tafelberg didn’t withdraw the book immediately?

          Let’s face it you can’t buy that kind of publicity.

          They seem to have been a bit slow in following through with their threats. I suppose it takes time to trace all those “sources” of yours.

          It would be great if you could let us into the secret as to what you plan to do if the Government or one of the many rogues you have maligned eventually decides to go to court.

          By relying on so many “sources,” whose identity you say you will never reveal, aren’t you inviting a defamation action against you and your publisher? The enemies you made will surely be saying to themselves: “He can’t have any other more substantial evidence against us if he is relying on so many anonymous people, otherwise he would have produced it without resorting to them.”
          Another problem you have is that hearsay evidence is not allowed in our courts.

          If the worst comes to the worst will you be telling a judge that your “sources” that you need to prove the truth of your allegations have either died, emigrated or are too ill to attending the hearing.          

          Whatever you do they are going to take some explaining unless you can persuade them to come into the open. Nobody, as far as I know, has yet managed to win a court case with faceless witnesses.         

          While you are waiting to see what happens how about this for an idea.

          As you have clearly made a fortune out of Zuma why not reward all those loyal “sources” of yours by inviting them to a really posh New Year’s Eve shindig where they won’t have to worry about being recognised because it will be - a masked ball.

          Best of luck,

          Regards,

          Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman

P.S. Jacques I’m sorry I can’t reveal what my “sources” have told me.  I’ve been sworn to secrecy.

See: journalism's real disgrace