Those of us who peruse the popular press learnt a few things about our world last week. Well, I say popular press, but it would perhaps be more appropriate to say the increasingly unpopular press. More on that later.
We learnt that South African soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are laying their lives on the line for a pittance, while their office-bound superiors are raking in a lot more money. Journalist Erika Gibson from City Press investigated and discovered that infantry soldiers, the ones who are actually on the frontline risking their lives, earned only a third of the special allowance allocated by the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The special allowance is about R108,000 per soldier per month, and the countries that receive this allocation each decide for themselves how much of the allowance is paid to the soldiers.
There were some startling details in Gibson’s story. For instance, the amounts allocated to soldiers who are in dangerous situations seem very small. For “special danger situations, where the area is considered a so-called red area of conflict, as in the DRC,” soldiers are allocated R881 extra a month. For “dangerous situations, where live ammunition is used against the soldiers”, they get another R588. I really loathe the sorts of people who toss around the phrase “life is cheap” about African conflict areas, but this does seem a little cheap. In total, South African soldiers receive R32,351 of the R108,000. And that’s before tax.
A couple of other details that will make you wonder just how dysfunctional our defence force is: some of the South African soldiers “had to pay about R5,000 out of their own pockets for tents before their deployment because no military tents were available for them. When the cheap military tents finally arrived in the DRC, the quality was so poor that the soldiers struggled to stay dry.”
And soldiers who are deployed for a year are allowed to go home for two weeks, after they’ve served six months. But, here’s the baffling part: they have to buy their own flight tickets. You’d think the country that sends you off to fight a war on its behalf could at least pay for you to get home for your leave.
This sort of investigation is why I’m always harping on about how essential news organisations are to the preservation of our democratic rights. Last month the 2025 Taco Kuiper Award for Investigative Journalism was announced. The winner was News24’s Sikonathi Mantshantsha, for “Waste Land: How raw sewage pumped by West Rand municipality is killing rivers, farms and business”. It is a series of stories that exposed the terrible state of municipal sewage and sanitation infrastructure in the Mogale City local municipality and described the indignity suffered by the people living in that area.
The other finalists were also examples of strong, relevant investigations. Runner-up Dewald van Rensburg of amaBhungane, for example, wrote “The #Laundry”, described as “a meticulous investigative series”, exposing a vast, tangled web of international money-laundering networks. The stories involved intensive collection and forensic analysis of enormous amounts of confidential data on major criminal enterprises plugged into South Africa’s financial system.
Judges lauded the series as an example of “true enterprise in investigative journalism that drew on the expertise of deep dives into projects such as The Gold Mafia, Swazi Secrets, and Zondo Commission annexures to painstakingly expose the blueprint for the mechanisms used to launder money worldwide.”
These kinds of deep investigations aren’t something your average South African newsfluencer is capable of doing. Yes, “newsfluencer” is now a thing. And it’s not a terrible thing.
The term was coined by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ), and it describes people (or AIs, I guess) who, though they’re not traditional journalists, are actively shaping news consumption through their content on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
You’d think the country that sends you off to fight a war on its behalf could at least pay for you to get home for your leave
Newsfluencers present news in an accessible, informal, and opinionated way, which helps them to connect with the digital-savvy audience that is deserting traditional news platforms in droves. As you can imagine, this blurs the lines between traditional journalism and what we are now calling content creation. Typically, your newsfluencer challenges the established norms of news delivery and consumption, and often doesn’t have the same institutionalised journalistic systems of ethics, standards and safeguards.
In one sense, newsfluencers are a positive thing, in that they’re making sure that news reaches a lot more people than it would if we were relying on traditional media. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, they’re not exactly going to be doing the hard investigative work. In a report titled “What do we know about the rise of alternative voices and news influencers in social and video networks?”, the RISJ notes that the US has a much higher use of YouTube for news compared with many other countries, and that X recently refocused its strategy on video and is supporting commentators such as Tucker Carlson, formerly of Fox News.
Commenting on its list of most mentioned newsfluencers in the US, the RISJ notes that “it is striking that all of the most mentioned (top 10) individual names are known for political commentary or chat rather than original newsgathering”. And that, I would suggest, is going to be pretty much the case in South Africa. As welcome as the rise of the newsfluencer is, in terms of reaching new audiences and pioneering new formats, we’re going to need investigative newsrooms to keep the supply of investigative projects flowing.
I made a quip about the unpopular press earlier, but it’s no laughing matter. According to Annie Kelly, the editor of The Guardian’s Rights and Freedom series, there is a war on journalists raging across the world. She points out that last year, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) recorded that at least 124 journalists and media workers were killed in 2024, which is the highest number of media workers killed since the CPJ began collecting data three decades ago. Nearly two-thirds of the journalists killed were Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank. But other deadly countries for journalists included Sudan, Pakistan, Mexico, Syria, Myanmar, Iraq and Haiti. In other countries, “hundreds more journalists were detained and imprisoned ... while others were harassed, assaulted and faced relentless threats and abuse online, as well as in their communities and places of work”.
This year is the first time in its history (it started in 2002) that the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) world press freedom index has classified the global state of press freedom as “difficult”:
“In 2025, a new low point emerged: the average score of all assessed countries fell below 55 points, falling into the category of a ‘difficult situation’. More than six out of 10 countries (112 in total) saw their overall scores decline in the index. For the first time in the history of the index, the conditions for practising journalism are ‘difficult’ or ‘very serious’ in over half of the world’s countries and satisfactory in fewer than one in four.”
RSF also claims that “though physical attacks against journalists are the most visible violations of press freedom, economic pressure is also a major, more insidious problem. The economic indicator on the RSF world press freedom index now stands at an unprecedented, critical low as its decline continued in 2025.”
According to the data collected, “in 160 out of the 180 countries assessed, media outlets achieve financial stability ‘with difficulty’ or ‘not at all’. Worse, news outlets are shutting down due to economic hardship in nearly a third of countries globally. This is the case in the US (57th, down two places), Tunisia (129th, down 11 places), and Argentina (87th, down 21 places).” And RSF points out that even a relatively well-ranked country such as South Africa isn’t immune to these challenges. This year, South Africa ranks 27th out of the 180 countries, and is the top African nation, just edging ahead of last year’s highest placed African nation, 28th-placed Namibia.
As always, it’s all about the financial sustainability of news organisations. Without our investigative newsrooms putting in the hard work to shine a light on the corrupt crannies of our country, we wouldn’t know about it. Whether they’re criminally inept, or just plain criminals, a lot of people would be getting away with it. Newsfluencers are a handy way of keeping the larger news ecosystem honest, and of spreading the word, but we need actual reporters to provide the words.
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