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President Zuma, we are sorry. On August 30, a City Press report, “ANC at risk of losing Mandela Bay”, detailed apparent comments by the president to party colleagues in that metro.
Our note-taking and reporting were so poor the Press Ombudsman instructed us to retract and apologise. I do so now without hesitation and with contrition. The presidency is not a target board and must be reported on with independence, authority and fairness. We always strive to do so, but failed in this instance, for which I am deeply sorry.
Also in the same edition was the story on the Nkangala District Municipality. We apologise for not capturing the municipality’s responses.
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The investigation into how these reports were crafted and edited and an audit of our cases and complaints before the ombud show weaknesses in our systems.
Even one fact we get wrong is one too many, as City Press is trusted by its readers and we should repay that trust by ensuring 100% accuracy and 100% adherence to high journalistic standards and ethics.
I would love to say: “Enough. No more. There will not be a single mess-up again.” But it’s not a guarantee any editor can make. Journalism is a wonderful and vital craft, but it is being done at a pace faster than I’ve known in 24 years as a member of the fourth estate.
It is also being undertaken by fewer people as we enter the zenith of our disruption from old media platforms to new ones. This moment is incredibly exciting and profoundly democratising, as each person with a phone is really his or her own “media” – able to report on what they see and believe and to talk directly to the established media, government or business.
For us in mass media, the speed and competition from new trends and the commercial pressure to do a lot more with a lot less means quality can slip. We cannot allow it to, though.
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This is where we stand for the year. Fourteen complaints have been made to the ombud against us thus far. We have lost four.
.IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi complained about an item in our satirical column, Siyahleba. We apologised – the first time in my experience that any media title has had to apologise for a joke.
.The Al Jama-ah political party complained that although we had not named the young Cape Town woman who had tried to join the Islamic State, we offered too many identifying details about her neighbourhood. We apologised.
.The apology and retraction to President Zuma is detailed above.
.In the matter of the Nkangala District Municipality, we did not report the municipality’s response to questions and overstated the cost of a staff dispute as R9 million instead of R8 million.
Four complaints were dismissed. One is still in process. One has been settled by offering an offended church a right to reply. The others have not been followed up by complainants to the public advocate at the ombud.
.We also clarified or made corrections 15 times this year. I wish it was at zero, but corrections and clarifications have always been a stock in trade for the media and will probably remain so. The best practice is to correct and clarify quickly and fairly, which we try to do.
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What are we doing to fix things? I’m not sleeping very well and have been a grumpy old cow in the office this week. But that’s not helpful.
.We have commissioned ethics and journalism professor Franz Krüger to study our systems and make recommendations to seal holes.
.We are getting Africa Check, the accuracy watchdog, to train us in how to set up improved accuracy protocols. This is in addition to an accuracy check each journalist is meant to do. Pressure means the step of doing the check is often overlooked; the editors will now ensure it moves up from a recommendation to a requirement.
.We are hiring a fact-checker to check every published fact to bolster trust and credibility. This is a fourth level of checking our journalism will be put through.
.We will only use anonymous sources for important stories and this will be done only after an editors’ discussion. This is to wean our journalists off the easy granting of anonymity. Too much reporting is done this way with insufficient interrogation of source motivation.
.This follows the overhaul of how we report on institutions that are in conflict, such as the SA Revenue Service, elite police unit The Hawks and the National Prosecuting Authority, after we were ensnared in a fight with one of them.
.The system of regulation, established and governed by the Press Council, is exhausting and tough to labour under. It is a system that is trusted by the public, as the numbers below show.
Print and digital media have in the Press Code and its attendant procedures a system that sets a higher bar for media performance than the courts do. To stay within the spirit of ethics is a tougher practice than staying within the letter of the law.
