All signs indicate that you, the reader of the FM, are a dying breed. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, though ironically, that’s actually one of the reasons you are a dying breed. When the 2025 Reuters Digital News Report (Reuters DNR) asked people why they are avoiding the news, one of the main answers was that it has a negative effect on their mood.
And news avoidance is a growing trend. Across the markets surveyed for the report, 40% of people say they sometimes or often avoid the news, matching the previous record high in 2024 and up from 29% in 2017. In South Africa, 41% of people surveyed sometimes or always avoid the news.
I thought about this amid the furore around the Sunday Times opinion piece by Kenneth Kgwadi, “Focus on Africa instead of Palestine”, with the blurb “Conflicts taking place thousands of kilometres away have overshadowed the atrocities taking place across Africa”. Kgwadi argues that South African leaders and the public devote way too much attention to Palestine while largely ignoring severe conflicts and crises closer to home, particularly in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province.
He criticises South Africa for expending “substantial political capital on issues and conflicts taking place thousands of kilometres away”, citing the genocide in Gaza, though he doesn’t, of course, use the word genocide. He urges us to invest that influence in African sociopolitical and security improvements and use our energies to help developing African states. This, he argues, would do more for African societies than “avoidable” confrontations with Western powers that bring limited socioeconomic gains. “Such an approach,” he writes, “would contribute more directly to the advancement of African societies than engaging in avoidable diplomatic confrontations with Western nations, which offer limited tangible benefits to the socioeconomic development of the continent.”
It’s a classic whataboutery argument. And Kgwadi’s bio attached to the column tells its own story, if you dig a bit deeper. He is a “political writer and research fellow at the Middle East Africa Research Institute”, a pro-Israel think tank engaging in African debates on Israel-Palestine. He also apparently holds an MA in African studies from Israel’s Ben-Gurion University.
Kgwadi has suggested in other opinion pieces that South Africans will lose out on all sorts of goodies if we insist on being upset by the genocide in Gaza. In an article on BizNews he argued that “UCT’s anti-Israel stance threatens academic freedom and expression”, and that an academic boycott prohibiting University of Cape Town scholars from working with “any research group or association whose author affiliations are with the Israel Defence Forces … could see the university losing the donations worth R200m or more, as funders are going to withdraw".
He added: “We have to think thoroughly about how the withdrawal of funds will affect the students, researchers, the university, and the society that benefits from the innovative research. We have many students who are roaming the streets because they could not continue with their studies due to a lack of funding ... Politicising the conflict, which does not directly concern us, will impede our progress as a society.”
That’s their right, just as it’s the right of readers like myself to call them unprincipled morons for doing so
As if the genocide stands outside politics, as if genocides ever could. “Institutions of learning and training,” argues our useful idiot, “should never be used as a political tool to pursue a narrow political and ideological agenda … The university should never discriminate against a particular group of people due to diverse political beliefs. UCT, as a premier university in the African region, should be in a position to tolerate everyone regardless of their political, social, or economic standing.”
He really suggests that killing thousands of civilians is “a diverse political belief” to be tolerated, rather than a human rights atrocity. And the suggestion that supporting Palestine’s freedom is somehow connected to students roaming the streets is a laughably transparent attempt at emotional blackmail.
Should the Sunday Times and BizNews be publishing Israeli propaganda? That’s their choice, and I’m sure there are people in the newsroom who would argue that they are simply not “discriminating against a particular group of people due to diverse political beliefs” and letting all sides of the story be told. That’s their right, just as it’s the right of readers like myself to call them unprincipled for doing so.
The Sunday Times is still trusted by a lot of readers. The Reuters DNR asks news consumers which brands they trust, and the Sunday Times was very highly trusted by 73% of respondents in 2025. It was at 74% in 2024, 73% in 2023 and 78% in 2022 — a decline of five percentage points in four years. Overall trust in news in South Africa dropped about the same degree, from 61% in 2022 to 55% in 2025.
Choosing to feature Kgwadi’s story is not necessarily a betrayal of editorial ethics. The Sunday Times might trust its audience to recognise Israeli propaganda when they see it, or might even correctly believe that part of its audience would welcome it as rational argument. That’s the way trust in a news brand used to work, but this sort of trust has been savagely eroded by the wholesale destruction of the information ecosystem in which news organisations now exist. And this is one of the reasons news consumers are increasingly turning to independent news creators.
“News creators”, as defined in the Reuters DNR 2025 report, are basically the podcasters and other personalities who now compete with (or sometimes complement) traditional news brands, especially on video platforms and social media.
A report this week by the US-based Center for News, Technology & Innovation (CNTI) reveals that, as of September 2024, about one in four people in South Africa got news from individuals rather than organisations and that, “in a mobile-first country where more than four in five residents say digital technology is ‘very important’ for staying informed, social media platforms have become vital news sources”. (Disclosure: my organisation, Code for Africa, partnered on both this report and the Reuters DNR.)
The CNTI report looks at “indie info providers”, what Reuters calls news creators. Though some evidence suggests news creators are less popular in South Africa than in many other countries, the data points to a clear trajectory that aligns with the global trend of personality-led journalism and the rapid rise of new entrants. With regard to trusting these news creators, Reuters found that “across countries, audiences expect the news media to be more impartial, more accurate, more transparent and, critically, to increase the amount and quality of their original reporting. Trusted news brands remain the first choice for many when it comes to checking information or alerting them to important breaking news, even if people don’t need them as often as they once did.”
It’s the “as often as they once did” that should make legacy news nervous. News consumers are moving away from news brands to relationship-first news, and the relationship can be with “a creator, a platform feed, a community or a format that feels quicker, clearer, more authentic and more culturally legible than legacy media”. But at the same time, news creators are often viewed as being less trustworthy and less impartial.
The question for brands such as the Sunday Times, and news journalism in general, is how to define impartiality. It can’t be allowing all competing opinions to be aired equally, because that just turns you into a conduit for the sort of clumsy propaganda evinced by the Kgwadi story. It’s more subtle than that. What we don’t want to do is suppress and silence competing voices, but at the same time, consumers are demanding that news brands do have values that can be seen in the news choices they make. It’s up to the reader to decide if those values align with their own.
