More chiefs, but where’s the service delivery?

I was given a little booklet by Statistics South Africa entitled Stats in Brief 2009, and a very useful little document is is too. Hardly bigger than a Kindle screen, it contains in its 200-odd pages a wealth of statistical data on South Africa, from economic statistics to tourism figures. All the data in this little book is also available on Statistics South Africa’s website, but the book format, with its ease of moving between pages/sets of data, somehow enables you to make connections that are much more difficult to detect while navigating the web. For journalists, it is a veritable treasure trove of potential stories.

For example:  on Page 64, you’ll find that there has been no virtually no job growth in the Eastern Cape province over the past nine years. Turn the page, and you’ll notice that there has been about 47% growth in one particular job category: legislators, senior officials and managers. Mmm. Thumb through to the section on municipal expenditure and – my, oh my – the Eastern Cape province spends more on municipal councillors’ remuneration than any other province save KwaZulu-Natal, which has about a third more people. In percentage terms, the Eastern Cape muncipalities devoted 4.4% of their expenditure to councillors’ salaries in 2008, compared with a mere 0.8% in Gauteng, and up from 2.8% in 2001. Now if service delivery only improved at a similar rate…

Kudos to Stats SA for making this sort of informaiton available in such a user-friendly format.

ANC’s Mantashe suggests the Press Ombudsman is biased. In fact, he’s been rather kind to the government.

African National Congress (ANC) secretary-general Gwede Mantashe has resurrected the idea of a statutory tribunal to police the media. According to a report in Business Day, he accused the media of “negativity” in their coverage of the ANC government and said the Press Ombudsman is unable to deal effectively with unethical journalism, which he claimed was “very prevalent”.

I don’t think we have to worry too much about this; a statutory media council would be too gross an infringement of media freeom to pass constitutional muster. Be that as it may, Mantashe should be called to account. What exactly does he mean by “negativity”? Reports about failures of service delivery? About corruption? And can he give examples to support his blanket statement that “self-regulation does not work”? Mantashe states that the current Ombudsman cannot fairly adjudicate complaints against the press because he is a former journalist, making him inherently biased. But is that the case? In fact, the evidence suggests the opposite.

I did a quick analysis of Press Ombudsman rulings over the past three years, and found only five cases in which the ANC, the government or a senior government official submitted a complaint to the Ombudsman. Two of those were upheld, two were partially upheld, and one was dismissed on appeal. Hardly evidence of pro-press bias!

If Mantashe and his party have genuine grievances about press coverage, perhaps they should make use of the Press Ombudsman’s complaints mechanism before declaring that it doesn’t work. They may just be surprised.

Mail & Guardian wins victory for press freedom

Mr Justice Mayat turned down an application for an interdict to muzzle the Mail & Guardian. The application was brought late last night by a Muslim organisation when it learnt the newspaper was publishing a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad (see my previous post on this). As a judge and Muslim, Judge Mayat said, he was bound by the Constitution (see M&G editor Nick Dawes’  Twitter feed). Good decision by a principled judge.

Not a great day for freedom of speech…

This from Die Burger (via Legalbrief):

Freedom of speech is central to a stand-off between a Cape Town art gallery and a national company which has demanded that one of the artworks be removed. According to a report in Die Burger, Pam Golding Properties has demanded the removal of the artwork ‘Hated Communities’ by Richard Mason. Pam Golding has also sought an undertaking that the Association for Visual Arts gallery will not attempt to sell the piece. The gallery’s director, Kirsty Cockerill, said they will not be censored. The artwork was removed, but replaced with Pam Golding’s letter on the wall. The report says the artwork depicts a notice board resembling some of the attributes in Pam Golding’s logo. It is made out of perspex with a light shining from within. Mason has similar ‘satirical’ artworks focusing on Pick n Pay, BP, Woolworths and Walt Disney. An art reviewer described the work as satire with ‘commercial, political and religious propaganda’. ‘Artists don’t have the time or money to get involved in bitter legal battles with big companies. The companies can bully artists into silence,’ Cockerill said.

Shame on Pam Golding. And shame on the art gellery too,  for caving in after saying they won’t accept censorship. They have the law on their side – remember Justin Nurse and SAB? - so why not take a stand?

More trouble. This from IoL (also via Legalbrief):

An interdict was served late last night against the Mail & Guardian and its editor Nic Dawes after publishing a cartoon by Jonathan Shapiro (Zapiro) depicting Prophet Muhammad, says a report on the IoL site. Dawes said the cartoon depicted Prophet Muhammad lying on a couch speaking to his psychiatrist. ’The cartoon picks up on the Facebook group which encouraged people to send pictures of the Prophet.’ He said when the first newspapers were distributed, he received a call from attorney Yusuf Ismail, stating that further distributions should be halted. ‘At that time I could not stop further distributions, and I would not have,’ said Dawes, according to a report in The Mercury. He said an interdict was then served and handled by Judge Mayat at the Johannesburg High Court last night.

Come on, I thought we were over this! At least I got my M&G in the post box this morning. The Eastern Cape batch must have been on the plane before the interdict was granted.

PS. Mmm. The cartoon is still on the website too. Good on you Nick.

cartoon

NYT’s Norris transforms humdrum market story

What a great example of financial writing from the New York Times’ Floyd Norris, who lifts the normally humdrum market story to new heights:

Combine one part nervous traders, one part Greek crisis and one part trader error. Stir in one part central bank complacency. Bring to boil. Panic.

Read the full story here.

McBride defamation judgment is a step backward for press freedom

Harvey Tyson, a former editor of The Star, memorably remarked that editing a newspaper during the dark days of the emergency legislation was like “walking blindfold through a minefield”. The job may be slightly easier these days, but the Supreme Court of Appeal’s judgment in Robert McBride’s defamation case against the Citizen illustrates that some of those landmines are still out there. News media had better tread carefully.

McBride, the former Ekurhuleni police chief, won R150 000 in damages, plus most of his legal costs, from the Citizen for calling him a murderer, a criminal and unfit to be appointed as police chief. The ruling sets off alarm bells for several reasons. For one, it is one of the largest-ever damages awards for defamation in South Africa, and together with legal costs would prove crippling to many a news organisation (if not for the Citizen). It is sure to have a chilling effect on future news reporting and commentary. Secondly, in rejecting the Citizen’s appeal against a High Court ruling, the SCA in effect ruled that it is defamatory to refer negatively to the past actions of someone who has been granted amnesty for those actions by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. That could make it very difficult to report and comment on the activities of people who were involved in human rights abuses during apartheid, and received amnesty.

Improving journalists’ understanding of international criminal justice

Should former President Thabo Mbeki be charged with genocide for denying HIV-Aids sufferers access to anti-retroviral drugs?

When Young Communist League leader Buti Manamela made such a call in November last year, it led to weeks of debate in the media, much if it, unfortunately, ill-informed. If journalists understood the law relating to genocide, and the international criminal justice process involved, we would have been spared an ultimately distracting debate: the real question is around accountability for political actions, but that got lost in the emotive war-of-words ignited by the term “genocide”.

Any journalist who looked at the definition of the crime of genocide, as stated in the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, would have realised immediately that Mbeki’s HIV-Aids policies could not constitute genocide, however much we want to hold him (and his cabinet colleagues) accountable (see below). But how many South African journalists had heard of the Rome Statute, let alone bothered to look it up?

A group of journalists, academics and activists met in Salzburg last week to draft a model curriculum for reporting on international criminal justice issues. The project, supported by the Salzburg Global Seminar, the Open Society Initiative and the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda at the University of Maryland, is aimed at giving journalism students a better understanding of international criminal law, and to help them identify stories and analyze events.

The fruits of their labours – a draft curriculum outline – is available on the group’s website, together with other useful resources. The curriculum is flexible – it can be adapted and fleshed out for different countries and levels of study. Participant academics will devise detailed syllabi and teaching resources, which may be shared on the website and, perhaps, a follow-up meeting later this year.

Genocide, by the way, is defined in the Rome Statute, Article 6, as:

“…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a) Killing members of the group;
b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

What’s with Business Day and the “internet thing”?

Business Day is a great newspaper and a must-read for me every day. Strong on news, great on opinion and analysis – but boy, when is it going to move into the digital age?

More than three months ago, editor Peter Bruce announced the newspaper’s new online strategy. But nothing has changed: the website remains a mess. Still having Monday’s column by your editor as the headline piece on your opinion and analysis page on Friday is no good. And if you are going to blog, then the least you should do is post from time to time. After promising readers a daily blog, Bruce last posted on December 13, and some other staff writers seemed to have thrown in the towel after just one attempt. What’s more, there is no information about the writers on their blogs, and the blogs are in now way mainstreamed as part of the newspaper’s offering to readers. It is as if someone decided to tack on staff blogs, and then forgot about them. Shoddy.

Newspaper bungled story of police ‘incompetence’

On Wednesday, Beeld  ran a story about a police reservist who was shot three times by a robber at his Pretoria home, and claimed he had phoned the 10111 police emergency number three times without getting help. Turned out the real reason why the man couldn’t get help was that his girlfriend had phoned the wrong number – not once, but three times, as Beeld somewhat lamely revealed in its follow-up story today. Instead of dialling 10111, she dialled 082 911 and got through to the emergency call centre of her cell phone company.

The initial story made the police look very bad indeed:

Zuma’s love child: culture does not justify everything

Speaking for the first time about his “love child“, President Zuma accused the media of invading his and the mother and child’s privacy, and “exploiting” the child for finanancial gain. I will concede one point to the president: the news media were careless in identifying the mother of the child, and thus, by implication, the child (who is entirely innocent in this matter). But, as I have pointed out previously, Zuma’s argument that his private life is his own business does not hold water. And his accusation that the news media are exploiting the child is, quite frankly, absurd.

Privacy rights “cannot be waived just because of the position one occupies”, Zuma said in his statement. He is wrong. Our law is very clear that privacy rights can be waived if there is an overriding public interest in disclosure, and that public figures – especially politicians – have a diminished right to privacy. If the president – already married to four wives – has a child born out of wedlock, it has financial implications for the state, and it contradicts his public statements about the importance of having safe sex. It also says a lot about his attitude to women (more about this later). Those issues make his sex life a matter of public interest, whether he likes it or not.