The saga of the blacklisting of Sowetan journalist, Anna Majavu, continues unabated this week as media institutes, political parties and analysts enter the fray. The ANC has called for the
TheMediaOnline spoke to Anna Majavu to get her take on the story.
Question: It seems like an extraordinary move by the DA to blacklist you, especially in light of its professed opposition to the MAT and its professed support of freedom of speech. Is it really just one story, one of course that relates to the actions of one its members, that has it gunning for you or perhaps a more general dislike of trade unions? What is your take on this?
Answer: Whenever the DA doesn’t like anything a journalist or an academic has published or blogged about, it sends people to pay the journalist a visit, or calls them up and complains – sometimes at great length. Many journalists complain about getting these phone calls and UCT constitutional law professor Pierre de Vos has blogged about this in the past.
We do also get these calls from other parties but the point I am making is that this is not the first time the DA is doing something like this. The “blacklisting” is nothing to do with my trade union background. The DA added me to their press list and kept me on it for over two years, all the while knowing that I had worked for Samwu in the past.
They only took me off their list when they filed their second complaint to the Press Ombudsman on the story about MP Pieter van Dalen having been implicated in taking pot shots at children in his previous job as a DA councillor in the City of Cape Town.
The other irony is that, in my previous jobs at Samwu and the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, the press releases I put out for the organisations were on the whole more critical of the ANC than the DA.
Question: I would imagine that having worked in communications for a union, and as a political reporter, you understand both sides of the media game. I’m sure that as a spokersperson for a union, you were asked to provide comment to publications that perhaps did not like unions. Did you ever refuse to comment in the face of a journalist’s perceived bias?
Answer: I never refused to comment to anyone but indeed, I too am guilty of once taking Ferial Haffajee off the Samwu press list for two weeks! She was then an associate editor at the Financial Mail and her publication had run a profile on the Samwu general secretary where they superimposed a viking’s hat onto his head. It was childish and when she asked to be put back on, I did so.
Question: What is your / Sowetan’s next move? Will you fight the blacklisting, or simply find the material yourself. It’s not as if it’s not available elsewhere so it seems a rather petty move by the DA.
Answer: The DA says they have cut communication with me but many of their MPs have not been informed of this and still speak to me regularly. They visit my office, I interview them in their offices. I told some of them last year that I had been taken off the list and they laughed and said it wasn’t possible.
I will lkeep going after any stories in the public interest, and especially those stories about subjects affecting Sowetan readers. If the DA media people don’t want to give me information, there are always other sources, even inside their own party.
In fact when some of their members resigned because they felt the DA had failed to discipline adequately a rural councillor who let her dog starve to death, I got the information from insiders and wrote the story. Soon afterwards, I saw DA officials writing on facebook that by writing that story, I had shown I had a negative attitude towards their party.
It seems that they genuinely expect journalists to send sources with credible and valuable documents packing if those documents show the DA in the negative light. This is not real journalism, and I won’t cover up for any political party, whether it is the DA, ANC or COPE.
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3 Comments
Herman Lategan
Anna Majavu in The Media Online: “I too am guilty of once taking Ferial Haffajee off the Samwu press list for two weeks! She was then an associate editor at the Financial Mail and her publication had run a profile on the Samwu general secretary where they superimposed a viking’s hat onto his head. It was childish and when she asked to be put back on, I did so.”
Llewellyn Kriel
As Jacques Rousseau points out in The Daily Maverick, there is a vast difference between blacklisting someone and simply taking them off your distribution list. The first is an active role in preventing a journalist from doing her job and the second is simply not facilitating or making life easier for her .
That the DA is wrong either way is beyond question. Any such action is intended to subvert the completely free dissemination of information. The DA owes the public an apology.
As we did many times many years ago at the Chamber of Mines, an inaccurate or false media report would be followed up directly with a correction and a private consultation with the reporter in question to determine where the problem arose. Only if need forced it did we escalate the matter. If editorial viewpoint was at issue, we requested – and were invariably granted – right of reply. And that was that. Both personal and organisational relationships were maintained.
My 36 years both as reporter, journalist, editor and academic on the one hand and manager, director and teacher of media liaison and corporate affairs have taught me there a good eggs on both sides. The professional practitioner of either craft seeks out the good and tries to avoid the bad. No reporter (as distinct from commentator or columnist) injects their personal biases and opinions into a story. That Anna Majavu has a reputation for doing just this is common knowledge and colours the credibility of all her reports and those of her employer – in this case, Sowetan. As a former senior revise sub-editor and acting night editor at that paper, I am intimately aware of just how hard we had to fight to ensure the highest possible levels of objectivity (given that pure objectivity is a fiction) and professionalism. That we frequently ran into the “Immovable Object” of entrenched political biases and personal agendas is proof of our failure. One such “object” has recently left Sowetan. Nuff sed.
It is a little concerning too that Glenda has chosen to take so superficial a perspective on a fundamental issue. We look forward to better in the future.
Philip_j
Re: “No reporter (as distinct from commentator or columnist) injects their personal biases and opinions into a story.” Would that this were still true. I can count on one hand, with fingers left over, the number of journalists here (and other countries) who do not colour their articles with reams of “opinion”. This is going to get worse with so called “citizen journalism”. Perhaps Majavu needs to be a blogger rather than a reporter?