Such tragedies as the deaths of 77 people in the Albert Street fire in Marshalltown, Joburg, affect society in many ways. There’s shock and sadness, and then there’s anger. People want to know how it happened, why it happened and, crucially, who is responsible.
It affects everyone. The person reading about it on their phone, first responders who endure the immediate horror, city officials frantically looking to communicate details, and those vultures of the rotting body politic, politicians scrambling to avoid responsibility. Those worst affected are the victims, and their families and friends.
Elsewhere on these pages, and on other media platforms, you’ll find answers to the questions above, or at least attempts at answers. You’ll also find some solid rolling coverage, and several think pieces asking hard questions about the people responsible for managing the city, as well as about the way society and political parties respond to, and think about, the sociopolitical problems that lead us to this sort of disaster.
All of which is to justify the focus I’ve chosen here, which is a potentially narcissistic look at how this tragedy has affected the way people think about journalism. When news organisations took sound bites from politicians and other invested parties, and presented them in an uncritical, unchallenged way, there was an instant reaction from audiences.
In a Daily Maverick article, Rebecca Walker, who ran a project in the Albert Street building, poses a rhetorical question that gives a flavour of how people are trying to wriggle out of being blamed for contributing to the tragedy.
“Did [the victims] know that they would be blamed for their own deaths? Labelled criminals, ‘illegal immigrants’, non-citizens by the very same state that has denied their existence. A state that let them burn. A state that symbolised the epitome of callousness when they stood in the simmering smoke and fluttering ashes of young children, women and men, and said that this was their own fault. A state that also blamed the organisations that had prevented unlawful evictions that would have seen families thrown onto the street. A state that didn’t even pretend to care. It only wanted to blame others.”
It’s powerful stuff, and when media houses started running interviews and statements that included some of the above excuses, without providing context or pushback, there was a backlash.
An example was a tweet from Newzroom Africa, which uncritically presented a video of social development minister Lindiwe Zulu’s attempt to dodge responsibility by blaming apartheid.
“Unfortunately for us, whether we like it or not, this is the result of apartheid, that kept people under such conditions and we are expected to have changed those conditions within 30 years,” she said.
It’s breathtakingly insensitive that she would choose to highlight how unfortunate the fire was for the government, and try to weasel out of responsibility. More than 70 people die screaming, but the real victim here is the poor ANC. And you wouldn’t be the first person to think, 30 years … that’s not nearly enough time to escape the effects of apartheid, but surely it’s long enough to have at least made a start?
Did [the victims] know that they would be blamed for their own deaths? Labelled criminals, ‘illegal immigrants’, non-citizens by the very same state that has denied their existence. A state that let them burn
— Rebecca Walker
Newzroom Afrika’s tweet prompted a response from veteran journalist Redi Tlhabi, who tweeted: “Are you guys journalists or mere observers? Are you filters of truth or enablers of populism? Are you there to question and report with nuance, history & context or [is] your day’s job to let politicians speak whatever they want, without pause? Shameful.”
A large number of people piled in to agree with Tlhabi, and there were also some who jumped to the defence of journalists, and young journalists in particular.
For example, News24’s Qaanitah Hunter wrote: “Logged on here and found a flurry of attacks on young journalists. Babes, your generation broke this thing. We are here doing what we need to do to keep up with a demand our older colleagues can’t even comprehend. I salute young journalists. It’s tough out there.”
Those polarised positions created, as is usual, space for people who just wanted to attack journalism in general. “You also did that with Cyril [Ramaphosa],” one user wrote. The implication being that ethical journalism is contingent, and selective.
This appears to be a common belief among those who have been persuaded by the conspiracy theorists, and at least a stated belief among those who have a vested interest in destroying trust in media.
In a way, though, the outrage shown by people, and significantly by those who don’t work in journalism, at the idea that our media is not holding politicians to account might be a positive signal. It implies that news audiences understand the product they are being offered, and what constitutes good journalism. For a while now, people have been proposing this sort of understanding of how journalism works as one solution to declining trust in media.
In 2017, for example, PBS’s Raney Aronson-Rath argued that “transparency is the antidote to fake news”. The idea is that the more people understand how journalism is produced, and the ethics and practice behind it, the more they will trust the media.
A 2020 quote by Deborah Turness, the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, illustrates this. “I want to ‘pull back the curtain’ and show people the incredible hard work going on behind the scenes at BBC News. Because I believe the more that people see the work our journalists do, the more they will know they can trust our journalism.”
In a recent paper (from which the above two examples are taken), titled “The Mirage in the Trust Desert: Challenging Journalism’s Transparency Infatuation” (July 2023), Jussi Latvala argues that transparency is not, in fact, the panacea that people hope.
“The scientific evidence is pretty damning. Transparency and its potential to build trust have been academically studied, and what research finds is that often transparency has no effects on trust. Sometimes quite modest positive effects are observed, sometimes it has even decreased trust in journalism,” he writes.
We could challenge this conclusion, and I’m sure many will in the coming months. For example, Latvala’s idea of what constitutes transparency and its parameters, and of what a trust economy looks like, is informed by a certain geographical and ideological perspective. This isn’t a gotcha moment, by the way. He writes about this himself.
But one of the issues he raises is the problem of what trust in news might actually mean. “Many media scholars think trust in news media is a form of institutional trust and could be defined as ‘voluntary vulnerability’. If someone trusts a news organisation, there’s a power difference at play and it makes the trustor vulnerable because — at least theoretically — it is possible for someone to abuse that trust.”
Fixing journalism is not just something that journalists want. It’s everyone’s problem
The angry reactions to newsrooms that appear to have naively and uncritically given unmediated coverage to government spokespeople saying outlandish things in response to the Marshalltown tragedy could be seen as a response to a perceived abuse of trust. And let’s face it, people are becoming inured to the betrayal of politicians by now.
Zakes Mda’s satirical response to Zulu and Ramaphosa’s attempts to blame apartheid for our government’s failings is indicative. “In the 30 years of our rule we didn’t have any power to do anything. Apartheid continues unabated to this day, and it is so powerful over us that all we can do is sit there in a catatonic position. Instead of reversing its evil machinations we took care of our bank balances (even in our stupor). We are weak and hopeless, please vote us back to power.”
So it’s not surprising that people feel a fresh sense of betrayal when they think that journalists, who are now one of the last lines of defence, fail at their jobs.
Latvala also points out that there’s more to trust than evaluating the quality of reporting. He writes that “what is interesting (and potentially frustrating for journalists) is the fact that trust in news media isn’t only rooted in the output or performance of journalists. It is also affected by political and cultural factors. Quality reporting doesn’t necessarily lead to high levels of trust, and high levels of trust are not automatically a sign of journalists getting it right.”
What does, I think, affect trust in news is if journalists start to differ on what constitutes ethical, defensible and, above all, useful journalism. It was unedifying to see the discussion around the coverage of government responses devolve into a blame game. Journalists blaming each other for what are clearly lapses of standards mirrors the attempts by the government to evade responsibility for the Marshalltown tragedy.
I think most of us acknowledge that the quality of journalism is not what it should be, locally or internationally. But we also need to acknowledge that this might be something that journalists can’t fix alone, given that the reasons are the ongoing structural erosion of the means of journalistic production and dissemination.
Fixing journalism is not just something that journalists want. It’s everyone’s problem, because good, incisive and trusted journalism is a tool for people invested in our country’s fight against corruption, political greed and basic governmental incompetence. But perhaps as importantly, journalism is also the only way the stories of the 77 people who died are told to the world.
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