Quality journalism or irresponsible reportage

Recently I’ve encountered a few things that make me worried about the state of journalism in South Africa. I find myself constantly correcting both facts and grammar in publications and am constantly wondering how it is that television news can incorrectly editorialise with such impunity. 

I picked up on a newspaper story recently with the idea of looking at the bigger picture of the issue for a television programme, so I called up the journalist who wrote the piece and asked if I could follow her leads but do my own investigation. She promised to email me the details and when it didn’t come, I went ahead and started investigating. Turns out the issue wasn’t as big as was made out in the article and, wait for it, she made up her case studies. So I called her editor and laid out my complaint in a detailed message. I am yet to get a call back.   

Then a friend of mine who used to be on the entertainment beat of a national publication wrote a piece on the South African version of Strictly Come Dancing and nodded to the British original with some trivia. She spoke about Bruce Forsyth earning the equivalent of R6-million per episode and was one of the highest paid personalities on air. When the piece printed, a clueless sub-editor who clearly didn’t know about the British show, changed Bruce Forsyth’s name for the local presenter’s and left in the R6-million salary. How does something like this happen?  

And let’s talk about headlines... I am so tired of these spurious headlines that tenuously link the content to the headline. So now you attach a plausible but false slug to a story, and this is just a headline grabbing tactic that is deliberately provocative or is meant to entice the reader and sometimes has little to do with the actual story. And I think it’s becoming more commonplace because these news outlets need click-throughs and comments on social media.

And social media is really taking its toll because people thrive on the commentary. So for example if somebody breaks a story online these days, they’ll simply say: “Shoot out at local mall” and there’s no content to the article – just something like: “journalists on the scene watching developments”. And to  them that’s breaking the news? No, it’s not. I mean, I could write an article with just a headline right now, that reads: “Gunshot heard in Westville, helicopters overhead and post it on Facebook or somewhere!” And this was what was happening about lunch time yesterday, but I have no facts about the situation; I don’t know anything about the story but watch how this becomes the truth.  

This kind of shoddy journalism misleads the public into believing this nonsense, because let’s face it, not everybody reads a piece beyond the headline. If you were to survey people, you would find that this is exactly the case. And what happens is the headline becomes the story. That’s all they get and they will go and tell that to somebody else and eventually this becomes the “truth”.  And so somebody will inevitable come up to you and say, “Oh my God, did you hear there’s a brothel in Westville and they’ll probably even give it the name of a road, when in fact it’s absolute lies because of some headline grabbing tactic that got it wrong. 

So headlines become incongruous to what the article is about as is the case in the story that said “Don’t pull a fast one on the N3”. To be quite honest all they quote in the piece is a bunch of statistics, but there is no discussion of the point. So you making a claim that Gauteng drivers are speed freaks, but do they only do it on the N3? Or compared to Kwa Zulu Natal? None of it is clear in the article, but the headline gets me to read the useless piece and wastes my time. 

Speaking of which, a newspaper wrote a front page article recently with the headline: “Westville Brothel Rumpus” but the fact is, this particular establishment was actually in Pinetown. 

And so someone took to Facebook with the observation: “This is not the first time I’ve had run ins with main stream media. Clearly, and I keep saying this, journalistic integrity sinks to a new low. This brothel is in PINETOWN. Read that again. If you had to put the name of the road into your Google Maps App on your cell phone you would actually clarify that teeny tiny point.
But clearly, headlines, as important as they are, facts and accuracy are not top of the agenda. I question who exactly checks, not even the finer points, but the big stuff of stories for accuracy. The sheer incompetency not only utterly drags down the name of a paper my own father used to write for, but defames the completely wrong suburb, let alone SAPS Station and management. A massive, if not front page (cold day in hell) apology is in order.”

At the end of the day it’s a dual responsibility. On the one hand it’s the responsibility of journalists to say: “Let’s give the facts and not sensationalise everything” and on the other hand it’s the responsibility of the public to stop being lazy and actually read beyond the headline.

Many journalists will argue that a headline is meant to grab someone’s attention, but we need to ask, “Is it responsible in this day and age where the consumption of information is being reduced to these bite-sized little bits of information, and where the headline could well be the tweet?” 
In the past, we would see the headline and then pick up the paper and actually read the article, but now in the era where we consume information 140 characters at a time, that’s literally as far as we get. People aren’t even getting beyond the headline and that becomes the story and I think this is a huge problem. 

So what this means is that people aren’t getting the truth. And there isn’t an opportunity to engage in the issue; there’s no engagement in the commentary, there’s no debate or discussion anymore. It’s not helping us be better, more informed citizens who are able to make choices. 

And so we also need to ask what is journalism’s mission as the Fourth Estate or watchdog that checks up on society and government and so on? It’s supposed to guard for the public good, it’s got to report on social ills and social wellbeing, it’s supposed to inform and educate and I don’t think it’s serving that purpose. What it’s doing is, it’s simply trying to generate news and generate stories because it needs click-throughs and needs to direct people to websites so there are eyeballs on web pages to generate advertising revenue; those little ads that pop up on the side every time you try to read the news online. If there isn’t that much news to report on, then maybe a 20-page newspaper is what you put out. You don’t need a bible in your post-box every Sunday.

In the end, I’d like to see more responsible journalism that educates and informs people and makes us all better citizens; people who are able to rationalise things as opposed to just inflaming people’s opinions and reinforcing stereotypes and prejudice. At the moment it’s a sad, sad state of affairs. 
     
You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @terencepillay1 and engage with him there.