Publication: Business Day Issued: Date: 2006-11-22 Reporter: Anton Harber Reporter:

Of Mistakes, Olive Branches and Sharpened Sticks

 

Publication 

Business Day
Date 2006-11-22

Reporter

 Anton Harber

Web Link

www.businessday.co.za

 

We left, lying around, the stick which our enemies needed to beat us, one journalist said this week. He was referring to the repeated misattribution of the phrase “generally corrupt relationship” to Judge Hilary Squires.

“No, no,” another journalist butted in. “It was more like we climbed a tree, carefully cut off a stick, carved and shaped it and spent six months polishing it until it was just right for our enemies to use on us.” There are a lot of red-faced reporters and editors this week. I have heard of more than one case of a journalist who, wanting to use the phrase, did what they might be expected to do ­ a word search on the text in which the phrase was supposed to have originated. In all these cases, they failed to find it. But they fell back on the number of respected journalists who had quoted Judge Squires saying it, without any correction.

They assumed that he must have deviated from his text to say it. They assumed, not altogether unreasonably, that if there had been an error, it would have been pointed out.

So convinced were some that Squires must have said it that a number of people last week sat through all five hours of the video recording of the judgment in search of the phrase.

It is not there.

There have been three kinds of responses from journalists. The most foolish were those who lashed out at the Supreme Court of Appeal judges who continued the misattribution and used it in their dismissal of the Schabir Shaik appeal.

If there is one thing journalists, like judges, should know about, it is human frailty. They see enough of it and make enough of their own mistakes to know how foolish it is to jump on other people’s errors, especially when you and your colleagues have been making the same one week after week.

Zuma himself this week, in an address to editors, attacked journalists for their mistake. But then, asked if there was anything he had said or done that he would not do differently, in other words, to admit his own mistakes, he brushed this off and declined to take the opportunity to clear the air.

Some journalists have dismissed the misquote as “a storm in a teacup” *1. It is true that it is easy to see how the original mistake was made, and how such a convenient sound bite could proliferate, if not corrected. It is also true to say that very little ­ particularly in the appeal process ­ hung on it. After all, the judge did refer to a “mutually beneficial symbiosis”, but unfortunately this does not have the ring of the phrase he did not say.

But attributing the quote to him was still a mistake, made and perpetuated repeatedly by journalists over a long period. The third group of journalists recognise this, and are shamefaced, as has been shown by those newspapers that have published an apology.

The truth is that journalists make mistakes, judges make mistakes, even Zuma makes mistakes. Zuma, as a politician, seems able to shrug them off. Judges have systems of appeals and more appeals in order to try to minimise errors. Journalists have fact-checking systems and then rules about quick corrections which are supposed to minimise and then reverse errors which are inevitable in the heat and hurry of news production.

But they still happen. And when they happen they hurt our credibility and standing. And when no one corrects them, the damage is extended.

Behind this series of events lies the traditional reluctance of judges to say or do anything after pronouncing judgment. For Squires to write a private note to an editor about the matter was a difficult and unusual step to take.

But this reticence is breaking down, I am glad to say. Judges in both the Constitutional Court and the Appeal Court now put out summaries of their judgments and some will even help a journalist understand a complicated ruling or procedure, or point out an error in a helpful way.

While there will always be limitations on what a judge can say, the more these anachronistic barriers break down, the better it is for all of us to help avoid what has happened in this case.

Journalists might have repeated an error but other parties allowed it without pointing it out until it was too late.

Harber is Caxton Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand and writes the media blog www.theharbinger.co.za

With acknowledgements to Anton Harber and Business Day.


*1       Legally it's a “a storm in a teacup".

Politically it's monstrous because it's an attempt to preclude Jacob Zuma from being re-indicted.

Journalistically it's big because it's an attempt both to assist Zuma and for some within the Fourth Estate to become famous.

The result, the trial judge and the SCA judges come out cleanly, the waywood journalists, especially Karima Brown and Vukani Mde, with a full ostrich egg on their chins.