Dispatch on other side of alleged ‘leaked’ document

Every time police arrest one of their own we are all shocked. We are shocked particularly because we have an unrealistic expectation that a police officer cannot commit an offence or be falsely accused of committing an offence.

We go further and pronounce a finding of guilt, forgetting that like any other person, the officer must go through the normal process of being prosecuted.

But I guess it is even harder for one police officer to go and arrest a colleague. One can imagine what goes through his or her mind and the feeling of what would happen if the arresting officer were to find himself or herself in a similar situation.

At least we are used to the idea. We are still to get used to negative reports by one media house about another.

When the ANC national spokesperson, Zizi Kodwa, made serious allegations of a plot by the Daily Dispatch to bring down the Eastern Cape government and to tarnish the premier, it appears to have sent serious shockwaves through the hearts and minds of journalists.

The reaction told it all.

Even as everyone said, they didn’t at that stage have any facts to support their rejection of the plot allegation, the rejection was emphatic.

Quite interesting is that the allegations were based on an alleged leaked document. This is interesting because half of the time media reports are based on leaked documents and sources that are not to be named.

I guess it required extreme restraint from journalists to call for the source to be named,  bearing in mind  it is not in their habit to name their sources.

But this whole saga, whatever the final outcome will be, presented quite an interesting scenario from an outsider’s point of view. First, very few of us know how newsrooms work. All we know are the finished stories with attention-grabbing headlines. It is very easy to forget that these headlines and the accompanying stories are the work of human beings like us.

Just as we understand little of what goes into police work to finally pounce on a wanted criminal. Like the police, who will give very little away prior to an arrest, journalists will  give away little information until a story is published. Similar to when the police come to you to obtain a warning statement, you have no clue how much information they have and what exactly they are looking for.

Maybe it is time the media itself makes us understand how they work.

Second, when journalists talk of a diary, you would think it is in the same context as you handle your diary. In fact, it is somewhat similar, except probably theirs reflects a complex set of stories against very tight deadlines. There are also uncertainties as to whether the information sought for a story will materialise.

So, when a journalist argued that the supposed leaked document was not a diary as alleged, they lost those of us who don’t know how they operate.

Third, there is the reality of negative publicity. No one wants it and in every situation – even of potentially negative publicity – the affected do go in an overdrive mode of defence. Whether the defence will, in the final analysis, make sense is another matter. No one would want to fail to try.

I was just amazed at how ANN7 ran the story and the speed with which the Daily Dispatch editor tried his best to defend the newspaper, whilst travelling on the road to somewhere. I am sure at the time, he couldn’t have been watching ANN7 and wouldn’t have known exactly what was said. But would you fault him for doing what he deemed in the best interest of his paper?

The analysts were roped in and there was all sorts of social media hype.

This presented some very interesting lessons, chief among those was that indeed one can trust the media to report without fear or favour. One would have thought ANN7 would be loathe to go against their brothers and sisters in the industry and rather report in a biased manner under the cloak of an attack by the ruling party on another media house.

But the response of the Dispatch reaffirmed that all organisations and humans in similar situations react the same way. The no comment mantra was definitely not an option. More telling was the possibility of misrepresentation of what the editor sought to present – that there was no such thing at all. The more he said that, the more the story appeared true, and the more juicy it became,  with more appetite injected into the viewers, just the way an attention-grabbing headline in a newspaper attracts readers.

The bigger intrigue was how the matter should be dealt with. Certainly, with the editor not in possession of the offensive document to enable him to do any verification, for whatever good measure, and the ANC spokesperson having defined a process to be followed, that of a meeting with the South African National Editors’ Forum, another important question arose. Are the existing mechanisms to resolve any disputes between political parties and the media not effective, or was this a strategic move to leverage something else?

I guess this will be answered when the matter is finally resolved.

Of all the actors of the day, Mathatha Tsedu (director of Sanef) came up tops. He brought calm into the whole saga by not engaging in the merits or demerits and not making any suggestive pronouncements. This in my view put him in the strongest position. Now he has all the time to assess the merits or demerits and is not bound to any public pronouncement. If his preliminary view of the matter was wrong, only he will know.

Advocate Modidima Mannya  is former Eastern Cape director-general of education