Give it a break already on the Sunday Times report

Good grief, I’m tired of the sanctimonious nonsense going on at the Daily Maverick over the Sunday Times report.

Like many in the media, I’ve heard that Maverick has been sitting on the 2008 Sunday Times report for which  Rhodes student Michelle Solomon had made a PAIA application — and covering this process and her reasons why it should be released in what was at the time a very interesting Daily Maverick article called: “Sunday Times and me” (April 2011).

But I couldn’t understand why Maverick wasn’t publishing the report — it made no sense — and now we have the answer.  It turns out that Solomon was given the report quite some time ago but on the condition that she not make it public. This, she wrote for Maverick this week after Business Day published the Sunday Times report on its website along with a Q&A with Avusa editor-in-chief Mondli Makhanya.

Because Solomon  had agreed not to make the contents of the leaked report public, she went the PAIA route in the spirit of restarting “a much broader debate about the lack of trust between the SA public and SA media”.

One of Sunday Times splashes (this one in August 2008, later retracted) that led to an outside task team being appointed to look into the paper's internal processes.

Well, for heaven’s sake, child — why did you accept the report under these conditions?  You should have turned it down and found another way to get it.

I don’t know Solomon at all but I understand she is young and only has a couple of years’ experience in a newsroom (at the Daily Dispatch) so maybe I’m being unkind but so much of  this hoo-hah is rooted in her lack of experience and I do have to wonder about her motives.

Business Day’s editor, Peter Bruce, was generous in his editorial thanking her for her crusading journalism after Solomon stamped her feet on Twitter on Wednesday, clearly piqued that Business Day had not credited her in their story for making the original PAIA application.

Papers like the M&G makes hundreds of PAIA applications and break big, important stories regularly and don’t get miffed when competitors pick up the stories and don’t credit them. It comes with the territory.

I would never have made a PAIA application for the report but gone back to my source and tried to twist their arm on the original terms or found someone else to leak it.  A PAIA application was always going to be the most difficult route and few news editors would have advised this course. Although companies are certainly not exempt from PAIA,  it was always going to be tough winning this case against the Sunday Times, which would have argued that it did not want to reveal sensitive information to competitors.

While PAIA applications regarding organs of state are reasonably straight-forward because they are funded by tax payers, my understanding of PAIA regarding companies is that the applicant needs to demonstrate which constitutional right (or rights) has been infringed on because of the withheld information. So, for instance, if you are dismissed from a company and you need information from them to fight a law suit or a CCMA case – or if  they are polluting your area — you can quite clearly demonstrate which rights are under threat.

Arguing that a newspaper that you have never worked for release a three-year-old report on its internal processes has infringed on your constitutional rights was always going to be a hard sell.

Now that the report is out, it’s not really that exciting. I’ve read through three-quarters of it this morning and as an ex Sunday Times reporter, there are no surprises. While there is a voyeuristic thrill in reading it if you’re a media luvvie like me, there’s little more in the report than I wrote about  a few months back in a column for Bizcommunity:

It was plain as day to anyone who worked at the Sunday Times at the time that the paper was top-heavy – too few reporters; too many of what we salaried Sunday Times hacks laughingly called “the helicopters”.

These were the middle managers with nothing in particular to do but meddle, sometimes to the newsroom’s detriment, if the helicopter in question didn’t have real hard-news experience. It was legend that your story was cursed if it were contending for the Page 1 splash. One ‘sarcy’ remark from a helicopter at the editor’s conference could torpedo it completely or you might spend the Saturday before deadline tying yourself up in knots as you dealt endlessly with queries and rewrites that had the potential to obscure the original angle.

And this was the case long before the editorship of Mondli Makhanya, who was running the paper in 2008 when the task team did its investigation. I would say an underpowered news desk under Makhanya made a key contribution to the less-than-rigorous environment that allowed the infamous “Transnet sold our sea to foreigners” story to make it into print as the paper’s Page 1 splash in August 2008. (It was retracted soon after.)

It’s not rocket science. If there are gross inaccuracies making it into print, it means there has been a slip in rigour – in reporters and news editors, sub-editors and editors being thorough in checking and double-checking the facts – and that they understand the facts correctly. You don’t need a panel to tell you that.

 

Solomon has written that’s she’s not in this for scoops – and that, for me, says it all. There’s no journalist I know who won’t admit that getting a scoop is totally fantastic. Really, the lady doth protest a little too much.