Journalist's Journal
By Kristy Siegfried Posted Oct 1 2004
The (South Africa) Star/Mujahid Safodien
Kristy Siegfried interviews a woman at a Muti market in Johannesburg, South Africa, where traditional healers buy ingredients for their medicines. Siegfried was working on a story about how traditional healers are helping people with AIDS.
You've been assigned to write about a nutritional supplement, which, reportedly is working wonders for people with HIV/AIDS. Several medical experts you interview claim the product is so effective it can be used to delay the use of anti-retroviral drug treatment. Other experts say the supplement should only be seen as complementary to drug treatment. A woman you interview, who is HIV positive and has been taking the supplement, says you can use her name but not her photograph as she has not disclosed her status to her boyfriend. Finally, several sources warn about the possibility of stigmatizing the product if you write only about its benefits for people living with HIV/AIDS.
It was an actual story I had covered. It was also a scenario I asked trainee subeditors to ponder while I was teaching a media ethics course for Independent Newspapers in South Africa.
I had agonized, before teaching the course, about how appropriate it was for me, a Westerner, to teach ethics to journalists operating in a distinctly non-western context. I wondered whether journalists around the world share the same set of ethical principles or whether they are more specific to the conditions and societies in which we work.
Fortunately, before teaching the course, I had four months in a South African newsroom to gather some impressions. I worked for The Star, a Johannesburg institution that has been around since the city was little more than a mining camp. The newspaper was absorbed by the international media group Independent Newspapers in the mid-1990s and has since faced a familiar pattern of declining circulation and bottom-line decision making. A bare-bones team of just 24 news reporters must each produce up to three stories a day to fill The Star’s four daily editions.
Journalistic ethics were not really a topic for debate during South Africa’s apartheid era. It was not until freedom of the press was enshrined in South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution that ethics became a prominent issue. Since then, a number of high-profile ethical gaffes have shaken the profession, fuelling debate about the greater need for responsible journalism that comes with greater freedom. In the past year alone, two journalists lost their jobs after leaking an unproven, off-the-record allegation that the vice president was an apartheid spy; Sunday Times editor Mathatha Tsedu was ousted amid claims that he had abandoned balance in an attempt to “Africanize” the paper; and media coverage of an alleged rape case involving a high-profile judge was criticized for its insensitivity and sensationalism.
The Star has had its own share of lapses. It was facing 30 lawsuits at the beginning of 2004. The paper’s editor, Moegsien Williams, commented that the feeling of euphoria that followed journalists’ newfound freedom of expression had led many to mistakenly assume there were no limits on what they could and could not write.
The Star has its own ethics code, which encompasses the same principles of accuracy, fairness, honesty and independence as its American counterparts with a few distinctly South-African additions, such as a commitment to “enhancing the welfare
Compounding economic and time constraints was the youth and inexperience of many of The Star’s reporters. A national audit of journalistic skills, commissioned by the South African National Editors Forum (SANEF) in 2002, uncovered numerous deficiencies among junior journalists, including ethical skills. Many local journalists I spoke to attributed the so-called “juniorisation” of South Africa’s journalism industry to the educational inequities of the apartheid era.
Although in theory blacks and coloreds – a local term describing people of races other than black or white – now have access to higher education, most cannot afford it or lack the necessary basic education to build on, says Steven Wrottesley, a former top editor at the Independent. Meanwhile, many more experienced black journalists have been recruited to work in government and corporate offices, leaving less experienced staff to grapple with the complexities of covering South Africa’s transition.
A new program in journalism, of which the ethics class was part, represented an attempt by the industry to address the skills shortage. The one-year program, piloted by the Independent at its newspapers, was regarded as something of an experiment and was limited to training 22 subeditors. In contrast, reporting interns still did not get any classroom training beyond a one-day course in which they received a copy of The Star’s ethics code and its style guide. Overworked editors did their best to provide coaching and feedback but often had to rewrite copy submitted by interns and junior reporters without having time to explain why.
One of the interns occupied the desk opposite me, so I sometimes helped him with stories. Like most of the black reporters, his first language was Zulu, not English. Although he had received some journalism training at a local technikon, a two-year trade school, he struggled with organization and sourcing. Reading through a story he was working on one day, I mentioned that one of the quotes he was using repeated information he already had. He proceeded to retype the quote without referring to his notes. When I told him that simply rewording it was not an option, he looked bemused.
The trainee sub-editors exhibited similar habits. As the program coordinator explained to me: In theory, they embraced basic ethical principles of truth telling, fairness, independence and accuracy. In practice, however, the idea that they could not use a direct quote unless they could be sure of its word-for-word accuracy was met with resistance. I noticed that checking for accuracy was generally regarded with suspicion and was seen as tantamount to giving sources permission to change quotes. Journalists’ attitude toward ethics sometimes differed along racial lines. Black journalists were more likely to view community service and social responsibility as ethical priorities.
One black intern I spoke with summarized his ethical priorities this way:
“South African life is unbalanced. You have the rich, and then you have the poor. Black people are starting to make their way up but there’s still a big gap between the rich and the poor and I think my role is to make people aware of what poverty has done to South Africa … and try and improve their lives and always keep the government on their feet so they can speed up development.”
On the other hand, white and colored journalists placed a higher value on maintaining balance and independence. At least these were the findings of a 2002 colloquium, held in response to an inquiry by the South-African Commission on Human Rights into Racism in the Media. The results revealed a significant difference between black and white media practitioners’ views of the role of the media in their fledgling democracy. According to the attendees, white practitioners see press freedom, editorial independence and respect for the law as priorities, whereas black practitioners are more concerned that the media serve the needs of the community.
Given the task of creating their own ethics code, the trainees drew on universal principles but also included points that addressed their country’s current needs as a transitional society faced with the immense problems of soaring crime, 40 percent unemployment and an AIDS epidemic that is expected to cut life expectancy in half by 2010.
One particular point in The Star’s ethics code encouraged reporters “to be positive and constructive but not misleadingly optimistic or bland.” This might have raised eyebrows among American journalists, but South African trainees recognized it as necessary given their country’s grim realities. Most incorporated it in some form or another in their own ethics codes. Several also included points specific to reporting ethically on HIV/AIDS. The social stigma surrounding the disease in South Africa means that reporters must be extremely careful not to publish names or photographs of individuals who are HIV positive without their consent.
While ethical considerations may be specific to certain societies, the conditions that make ethical behavior possible for journalists appear to be ubiquitous. The question of whether the fledgling copy editors will put their ethics training into practice will depend to a large extent on their employers’ commitment to provide work conditions that allow reporters the time and space to consider ethical issues.
From whatever limited glimpse I had gleaned of The Star’s cost-saving measures, reporters employed by Independent Newspapers are not likely to enjoy such luxuries. My impressions were echoed by media commentator Anton Harber, who noted:
“All South-African newspapers have had to tighten their belts, but none have done it with more passion and drive than Independent papers. Insiders say that in the last few years it has become an obsession to cut off the head of anything which shows above the parapet – and editorial resources have suffered most of all.”