Another week, another sorry instalment in South African journalism, with The Sunday Independent front and centre of the row.
It began earlier in the week, with e-mails to specific individuals from the editor of the paper asking them pertinent questions about their involvement in the creation of this year’s book publishing sensation, The President’s Keepers.
Were they involved? Did they feed author Jacques Pauw the information he used? Did they promise to stand by him when he faced the expected lawsuits from those aggrieved by the book’s contents, maligned by those same individuals or "sources" settling scores?
The reaction was almost a carbon copy of the time this newspaper dared to check on credible allegations about Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa’s extra-marital activities. The usual suspects took to social media to berate the paper and the editor. When we broke the Ramaphosa story, and beat an urgent late-night legal bid by his lawyers to stop us publishing, those same journalists wanted to know who our sources were.
This week there were no questions, only condemnation. The editor stood accused of revealing another journalist’s sources, effectively confirming our story because the very people we had suspected of being Pauw’s sources had revealed themselves by leaking our communication with them to journalists sympathetic to them. Why shouldn’t we ask questions about the best-selling book of the past decade? Why shouldn’t we ask questions about a book that paints the president of the country in a very bad light, with less than a fortnight to go before his party meets at Nasrec to elect a new leader where the atmosphere is so toxic that any prospective candidate is tainted by their association with him?
And why shouldn’t we be able to ask questions of the deputy president if we have credible allegations against him and his personal conduct - yet his boss is fair game? Then, as now, the picture is very clear; there is an agenda at play. Our media is not free but does favour individuals and factions - often to the detriment of the people it purports to serve and very definitely at the expense of the truth.
Sources are sacrosanct; they should be kept safe by the people to whom they entrust their secrets. If we don’t keep them safe they won’t speak to us. All sources too have agendas, axes to grind, otherwise they wouldn’t divulge their information in the first place, but that doesn’t mean that their information isn’t worth publishing. The problem is that some sources and some stories appear to be more equal than others.
One narrative not only drowns out all others, but simply demonises any story that has the temerity to go against the accepted truth. That is not journalism, that’s propaganda. And The Sunday Independent won’t be part of that.