/ 5 March 2009

The presidential love life and the public interest

No one disputes that public interest was well served by exposing the private life of Carl Niehaus.

Except perhaps the man himself.

He was one of the most vocal African National Congress (ANC) people to condemn media intrusion into the personal affairs of President Kgalema Motlanthe.

Now we know that he had a particular interest in maximum privacy.

But does his case mean that the love life of a politician, as distinct from fraud and bad debt, is fair game for coverage?

Predictably, most people in politics vote for privacy no matter what. In recent weeks Minister Pallo Jordan has argued this case, while the Communist Party’s Blade Nzimande has blasted the press for its coverage.

The debate evolved since its inception at the start of reports about Motlanthe’s alleged romantic linkage to a young woman. Her admission that she had lied made a cruel mockery of the media’s claims of public interest in publishing the story in the first place.

It was not a proud moment for South African media standards.

In principle, there was little to differentiate the coverage from the reporting pioneered by the UK’s Sunday Sport – if a person claims to have had sex with the ghost of Elvis, you’re fully in order to report it.

As long as there’s a real source making the claim, that’s enough. You’re not fabricating – merely reporting, and factually, what was actually said. Establishing veracity and public interest is then not your responsibility.

South African journalism ought to do better than this. But in the past decade, there have been many reports that amounted to false information, arising from the failure to check source accuracy. The Bulelani Ngcuka spy story is but one example.

The consequences of such poor practice are unedifying — particularly from the point of view of both private and public interest.

Jordan wrote last week that ‘the only person who has been harmed in this disgraceful saga is Motlanthe”. But it could be argued that the president’s dignified dismissal of the tale has enhanced his stature, and — instead — that it is, finally, the public interest credibility of the press that has been harmed.

It was in this context that editors in the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef) met Motlanthe in Pretoria last Friday. Dubbed as a background briefing not for attribution, the discussions ranged over the global economic crisis, Zimbabwe and job cuts in the media.

At the end of the two-hour dialogue, a member on the government side noted the proverbial unacknowledged ‘elephant” in the room. He went on to urge editors to reflect on the lessons of the Motlanthe coverage.

Motlanthe’s own response, long before the meeting, had also been to downplay the whole thing. Back then, he said he had more important things to worry about, and that the issue was one for Sanef and the Press Council to pursue.

His approach was to locate the controversy where it most properly belongs — in the realms of Sanef self-scrutiny and Press Council self-regulation:

* Sanef operates not as an organisation, but a forum, and on the basis of respect for each editor having his or her final say. Nevertheless, peer esteem plays a role there, even though the body will not normally pass comment on individual editors.

* The Press Council is made up of journalists and members of the public, with an express mandate to judge coverage, condemn bad journalism and compel apologies. It is subscribed to by members of Sanef.

Motlanthe may or may not complain to the Press Council. But a different approach to the saga is that of the Communist Party’s Nzimande who argued that it vindicated the ANC’s interest in investigating a statutory Media Appeal Tribunal (MAT).

His intervention serves a useful purpose because the ANC’s election manifesto neglects to tell voters that the MAT is part of the party’s policy package.

Although the MAT is far from being an electoral issue, one can foresee a post-election victorious ANC government claiming a mandate to implement all of its policies — including this particularly problematic one.

That South African journalism can also frequently be problematic, does not equate to the state regulation being the solution. At least in the Motlanthe girlfriend story, an unfettered press meant that the truth emerged in the end. Accurate journalism trumped falsehood without political compulsion.

The MAT would chill things right from the start — like deterring newspapers from potentially controversial stories like that of Niehaus’s negative behaviour.

A press with journalistic problems is not ideal, but it is still better for society than a controlled one. Best of all, of course, is a self-regulating press which operates with the highest standards of journalism and public interest.