Noseweek exposes Dearjon Letter

Dear Ray Hartley Editor of the Sunday Times,

         As you probably know by now Noseweek, South Africa’s only investigative magazine, has published a slightly shortened version of this letter in its May edition. But I thought you would like to read the original. So here it is.

*   *   *   *

        It’s deplorable the way your paper has been promoting crooks for years. This is especially so as the Sunday Times likes to brag that its team of investigative reporters are there to do just the opposite.

         Do you know what I’m talking about? Well you should if you watched Carte Blanche’s expose` on TV the other night.

Cholwich

        It was about the activities of two wide boys Kevin Cholwich and Francois Buys. They were said to have defrauded a host of people out of a total of more than R100-million over the last few years with a variety of scams.

News Flash 13/05/2012: BUYS commited suicide last week by hanging himself.

          But where the Sunday Times comes in was that two of their companies that were mentioned were Whoopee and Geo Connect.

Buys

         So what, you might ask? What’s that got to do with a paper that is believed by over 3-million readers a week?

The answer is that you have been carrying Whoopee and Geo Connect advertisements and various other suspect ones that promote get-rich-quick schemes.

And all my efforts to get you to stop have come to nothing.

         "We can’t be expected to check every ad that appears in the paper," you could argue. "That’s why we specifically warn investors to be careful where they put their money."

         Sorry that won’t wash in this case. I have been campaigning for more than three years to get your paper to stop these ads because they could harm a lot of people, particularly pensioners and those who can least afford to lose their savings.  

         I first complained to Thabo Leshilo in 2009 shortly after he had been appointed the Public Editor for the Avusa Group (Sunday Times, The Times, Sowetan etc). This Harvard educated, former editor of several Avusa papers, was billed as the Group Ombudsman.

         He apparently agreed with me judging by the story he wrote in the Sunday Times headed Taking a stand on unsavoury adverts. The report mentioned my name and implied that something was going to be done to ensure this kind of advertising no longer appeared.

As he put it ads, "like the rest of the paper had to be believable."

        Tragically it didn’t take long for your paper to revert back to its old ways. So I complained to the Press Council that it had not kept its word, but Thabo claimed to have no knowledge of the article. Unfortunately I had not kept a copy and it was nowhere to be found on the internet, so my complaint was dismissed.

         At one stage I accused him of being a window dressing appointment who had not been given the power to deal with complaints effectively.  He replied that he had been "agonising over this." Soon afterwards he disappeared without a trace and even Google still says he has the same job.

         The ads carried on appearing and I continued to complain.

         Thabo was succeeded, as you know, by veteran newsman Joe Latakgomo, who has an equally impressive pedigree. In the early days of his tenure he got upset with me because he felt I had accused him of being another lame ombudsman.

         But his subsequent reports in the Sunday Times and The Times have given little indication that he is anything other than a run of the mill columnist. I have only seen one that dealt with a specific complaint and that was mine. And even then he made no definite finding.

         In September last year he wrote an article headed Beware of dubious advertising claims.  And once again it looked as though your paper was finally going to stop aiding crooks.

         Joe told us that these come-ons "eroded the public’s trust in newspapers" and that "false advertising, or advertising that makes claims which are patently exaggerated, impacts on consumer confidence."

       Then he gave us this assurance: "We will continue as journalists to expose those who cheat and lie to our readers."

       Not only were these two scamsters not exposed in your paper, even though their dubious history of some 10 years or more was there for all to see on the internet, but the dicey ads continued.

         Now Carte Blanche has revealed that both Whoopee and Geo Connect were some of the many creations of the Cholwich-Buys team and people who invested in them lost the lot. So much for their money back guarantees given in your paper.

         One investor was Veronica Diedricks, a 47 year old former Telkom project manager who lives in Krugersdorp. This mother of two teenage boys put her entire pension payment of R250 000 that she had accumulated after 10 years of hard graft into Whoopee.

         She left Telkom because of white and black racial issues which meant the whites had little prospect of promotion and is now a contract worker for Nokia Siemens where she is "very happy." Her husband was retrenched and as neither of them gets a pension they were relying on the Whoopee investment to improve their lives. 

         Like many others she is not shouting whoopee, I can tell you. "Now money in my house is very scarce," she told me.

This was supposed to be a website linked to a call centre to enable people to advertise their businesses at a monthly fee. The men then took huge amounts for the privilege of becoming a licence holder in the scheme.  

Diedricks was promised R60 000 a month after 15 months, but all she got were a few payments of R28 and then last March a letter arrived saying the business had run out of money and was closing.

It had raked in R8-million.

Buys appeared on the TV show in tears as the duped partner who admitted very little. Cholwich was invited to give his side, but never did.

         Both men are unrehabilitated insolvents, who get people to front for them as directors of the companies. They have been going from one failed business to the next. Other names they have used include The Bare Essence, Phone Petrol, Prepaid Online, Duo Dial, Free Talk, Money Call, Dynamic Life and Xtreme Telecoms (its ads also appeared in the Sunday Times).

         A disgruntled former director has created a website for the sole purpose of warning people against the business practices of the two men.

         It claims that the motto they live by is "Fake it till you make it", and they certainly seem to have done that.

         The site, that includes pictures of theses smooth talkers, invites people to join its Justice 101 campaign to try and ensure that these con-men get what they deserve in a criminal court.

        I hope that you and your paper are proud of having helped them to fleece so many people, because without the huge exposure that the Sunday Times gave them, I doubt whether they would have left such a long trail of desperate, poverty stricken pensioners and bread winners in their wake.

         Your disgusted reader,

         Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman, who can’t say, "I told you", often enough.

         P.S. It’s not too late to give these two gentlemen the usual treatment that you meet out to corrupt Government officials and other individuals. The question is: "Are you man enough to do it?"                                     *   *   *   *
      When I told Bokkie Gerber, Editor of Rapport, South Africa's Afrikaans national Sunday paper to look a this post as it applied equally to his paper he replied: "Thanks. These kind of ads are a big concern. I have asked our ads department to take extra care to screen ads and not accept those with dodgy promises."
        His approach was totally different to that of the Sunday Times where no Editor ever admitted to me that there was anything wrong during my three year campaign to get the paper to stop taking these ads.
                

Racial insults pass sleeping editors

Dear Mondli Makhanya, Big Shot Editor and Sunday Times Columinist,

          Don’t you ever learn at the Avusa Group of newspapers (Sunday Times, The Times, Sowetan, Sunday World etc)? Columnists are by nature controversial so editors shouldn’t blindly trust them to do the right thing.

          Before columns are printed the editor or one of his deputies should read them to make sure that they have not over stepped the mark. But this doesn’t seem to be the norm at Avusa and as a result you keep putting your foot in racial quicksand and ending up floundering around with pathetic excuses.

          Three years ago that whitey, David Bullard got his marching orders from the Sunday Times. His crime was that he insulted Blacks in his Out to Lunch column.

          Mondli you were the Black editor of the paper at the time and you apologised saying, We were complicit in disseminating his Stone Age philosophies.  

        As you know your paper is big on investigations so how come he was writing for you for 14 years before you found that out?

          Well if you don’t mind me saying so Mondli you still have Stone Age editing on the papers in your group

          Nothing has changed since that 2008 boo boo even though you have moved up the ranks to become the Big Chief Editor of your entire Group.

          This time it was Kuli Roberts, a Black columnist, on the Sunday World who let her prejudices get the better of her without her Editor, Wally Mbhele, noticing until the Twitter hit the fan.

          She accused our Coloured population of all manner of diabolical behaviour. From being nuts; very violent as if Blacks are not; breeding like rabbits and having girls who are more obsessed with naai majiene than any other race. In other words sure bet, shaggers.

          If the African National Congress controlled Government is hoping to regain the Western Cape which is essentially Coloured, in the coming Municipal Elections, the oppositon Democratic Alliance must only wish that Kuli was still an ANC spokesman there?

          According to The Times, Wally awoke at the Sunday World with this inane gem, Though I recognise the right of columnists to express their opinions without fear or favour, these should not amount to prejudice.

          Have you ever read a column that hasn’t got an element of prejudice in it?

          Her’s, appropriately called Bitch’s Brew, was promptly axed.

       So much for those well worn, press clichés without fear or favour or publish and be damned.

          The aptly named Wally apologised and you added, Avusa Media will not allow any of its titles to disseminate prejudicial commentary that reinforces divisions and entrenches racial stereotypes.

          You’re a fine one to talk. Only a few weeks earlier your regular column in the Sunday Times was headed Healing its racial scars remains the Western Cape’s biggest problem.

          It was all about how Blacks felt out of place in Cape Town and that the racial discord in that part of the country requires action before it becomes a destructive wave. You didn’t say what action, but how about sending some Zulu Impis down to teach the Coloured Capies how to behave.

          The fact that you got the wrong end of the stick completely is something I will deal with at another time.

          The Western Cape, you said, remains out of step with South Africa’s march towards a non-racial society. What March? The Government for a start is making sure it doesn't go anywhere.

          Not half as out of step as your newspapers where the editors are snoozing while columnists have a field day with their racial prejudices.

          Did Kuli perhaps get the idea of knocking the Coloureds from that column of yours?  Could it have been a case of follow my leader with Kuli trying to impress by making it a lot more vicious this time?

          I see the statement your Group issued admitted that Kuli’s attack on the Coloureds was a clear violation of the South African Press Code and Avusa’s Media’s internal codes.

          I don’t know about the Press Code, but as I have often pointed out on my blog, newspapers in your Group don’t take much notice of your own internal codes and this is just another much more disturbing example of that.

          Can you tell me this? Will Kuli get fired by all the papers in your Group in the same way that Bullard got dismissed or will her Blackness save her?

          She has quite a media pedigree. She is or was Deputy Editor of the Sunday World; presents SABC’s TV reality show What not to wear and she also writes a social column in The Times. Could this also make her too big to boot?

          I suggest you warn Kuli, as she doesn’t seem to know much about these things, that if she ever writes another column she should never refer to an Indian as Kuli. It’s too close for comfort.

          Yours respectfully,

          Jon, former Sunday Times columnist in the days when Editors were not asleep at their desks.

PS. Watch out for Morals of Newspaper Columnists on my Blog.

Press Council's brand of Justice - Part I

Dear Newspaper Readers,

          This is the first of a two part series on the spat the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman has had with Big Brother, the South African Press Council. It threw my complaints against the Sunday Times out on their ear.

          They only got to second base where former judge Ralph Zulman, the head of the Appeals Panel decided they didn’t merit consideration by the other members of that body. He refused me leave to appeal.

          He inadvertently introduced humour into this solemn occasion when he emailed me his finding. When I told him I couldn’t open it he sent it to the Council’s offices to have it passed on only to receive this reply, Judge please fax us your decision as we also can’t open the attachment.

          The Press Council’s inefficiency was highlighted once again at the bottom of the fax I finally got when the judge added; I regret the delay in this matter. The relevant papers only reached me last week.

          That was nearly four months after I had lodged an appeal after my case had been dismissed by Dr Johan Retief, the Deputy Ombudsman.

          The Council can dawdle along but aggrieved readers are expected to complain within 14 days of a disputed article appearing and lodge an appeal within seven days if the Ombudsman’s decision is disputed.

          Let’s be serious; it’s no laughing matter for the Sunday Times, with its vast circulation, to be dragged before the Press Council to have it’s morals questioned by this nobody who calls himself the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman. After all isn’t the Sunday Times such a pillar of rectitude that it is entitled to police everybody else’s behaviour?

          The Council (slogan: Effective self-regulation is the best system for promoting high standards in the media) holds itself up as a shining example of how well it’s brand of justice works. It adjudicates on complaints against the mighty Press, or the Fourth Estate if you want to be posh.

          You’ll never see a report in any paper of my case because papers are only compelled to publish the result when the complaint is upheld. The centuries old maxim that justice needs to be seen to be done gets conveniently bypassed. It’s a cosy arrangement to avoid embarrassing papers that are always attacking Government and other organisations for trying to keep their secrets.

          Complainants are kept pretty well in the dark about what is going on behind the scenes. They don’t get a copy of the allegations that have been put to the accused and nor are they given full details as to what the defence is maintaining.

          Here’s what happened when I took the Sunday Times to task over stories that appeared in the Business Times section of that paper so you can judge just how good or bad this keep-it-in-the-family system works.

          Apart from the newspaper itself my other antagonist was Thabo Leshilo, an impressive heavyweight in South African journalism. Harvard educated he had been editor of the Pretoria News and Business Times and Editor-in-Chief of the Sunday World and the Sowetan.

          He became the Public Editor for the Avusa Group, which owns the Sunday Times among other publications, more than a year ago. He was billed as the person who takes up complaints on behalf of readers, making him the Group’s in-house ombudsman. So it was to him that I directed my concerns.

·       First Complaint. I drew his attention to the dubious investment advertisements that were appearing in the Sunday Times because I felt that a lot of people, particularly pensioners, often got tempted by these get-rich-quick schemes and ended up losing everything. The paper clearly had its doubts about these ads because it warned readers to be careful where they put their money as the paper could not vouch for the claims made by advertisers.  Leshilo evidently agreed with me. The half page report he wrote that appeared in the Sunday Times mentioned my name and that the Group’s advertising manager had agreed to be choosier about accepting this type of ad. Leshilo wise words were that ads, like the rest of the paper had to be believable. The new policy did not last long before it reverted back to type with promoters promising investors ‘30% interest’ on their money and other too-good-to-be-true opportunities.

·       Second Complaint. Noseweek, South Africa’s investigative magazine carried a story headed High on the Hog. How Jim Jones ripped off his website employers and then spun the story. It told how this former editor of Johannesburg’s Business Day, who was now writing for the business section of the Sunday Times, had pocketed $20 487 belonging to Moneyweb, his ex-employer. The spun story he wrote in the Sunday Times was a scathing attack on Moneyweb and was evidently an act of revenge because he had been fired by this firm. The white washed apology the paper carried under Jone’s byline conveniently left out the fact that he had departed from Moneyweb under a cloud. I asked Leshilo, Why is Jones still employed by the Sunday Times and isn’t it particularly hypocritical to keep him on as the paper is in the business of exposing corruption. I referred to an article Leshilo had recently written entitled, Journalists who dirty their hands subtitled A few scoundrels can tarnish the credibility of an entire industry. He went on to say, The big problem though, is the way the media handles their ignoble sons and daughters. Referring to another case he had been dealing with he added, I have never seen such foot-dragging, buck passing and abdication of responsibility on something so damaging to the credibility of a newspaper.  After I had emailed him several times to find out what was happening he assured me, I’m not sweeping the Jim Jones matter under the carpet. But that’s exact what happened because Jones continued to write in the Sunday Times and its sister paper The Times with bigger and bigger bylines.

·       Third Complaint. This was prompted by an SMS from Laurie that appeared in The Times. He maintained that judging by the columns Leshilo had written he was not dealing with any complaints. I then asked him, Isn’t it time that your Group admitted that you are just another columnist and that if readers want to complain you are not the person to contact. He replied that he had been agonizing over this.

         To be continued.

          Yours sincerely

          Jon, a Free Blog advocate. 

Add caption

Buy my book 'Where have all the children gone?' on Amazon.com It's a thriller with an underlying love story.