TOM EATON | A Pauw show from one of SA’s most trusted journalists

Of all the expressions of shock and anger about the Jacques Pauw fiasco, one Tweet on my timeline said it best: “F*cking hell, Mr Pauw.”

Tuesday’s groggy mea culpa from the rock star journalist was met with muted admiration from some and loud condemnation from many, but most would have agreed that Pauw’s initial piece (in which he accused Cape Town police of robbing him and implied that a Waterfront restaurant had been complicit in the shakedown), the Daily Maverick’s decision to publish it, and his subsequent retraction, are a catastrophe, not just for South African media but for civil society’s attempts to hold the powerful to account.

A generation ago, suspicion of the “mainstream media” tended to be a preoccupation of the political and social fringe, where bohemian freethinkers and counterculture warriors shared theories about how The Man was trying to brainwash us and cover up his economic crimes.

Trust in the media, however, isn’t a binary. When I remind myself that I shouldn't believe any journalist implicitly, I am not saying I should distrust all of them automatically.

Today, however, that mistrust has spread deep into the centre, fuelled in part by cynical political and corporate interests that profit directly from undermining the public’s faith in the news of the day. “Fake news”, after all, isn’t an attempt to make you believe a false story: its intention is to poison the well, so that you believe no stories at all and therefore become vulnerable to the loudest voice offering you the most comforting validation.

But even those who are relatively immune to the siren songs of Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg or Iqbal Surve are losing the faith.

Every week on my Facebook page I see comments from thoughtful, engaged South Africans who are drifting away from our big media titles.

Disillusioned by too many high-profile cases of fabricated or grossly inaccurate stories, exhausted by clickbait and enraged by interviews that are merely stenography, many tell me that they prefer to follow the work of a small handful of journalists and commentators, rather than trust the titles those journalists work for.

I don’t consciously distrust any of SA’s news sources, other than, obviously, the Independent Group, which we know is a propaganda outfit funded by the pensions of state employees via the PIC and, more recently, R20m from the State Security Agency.

Like those people in my Facebook comments, however, I do tend to follow certain writers rather than publications. And this week, as Pauw and the Daily Maverick delivered another ferocious blow to many South Africans’ trust in the news, I realised that I also believe some journalists based solely on their reputations.

When I read Pauw’s first piece, I believed all of it. Yes, there was an angry fuzziness around the edges. And yes, there were comments below the line from fellow diners suggesting there was more to the story. But the man who wrote The President’s Keepers doesn’t accuse the police of stealing from him — and the Daily Maverick doesn't run it as front page news — unless it happened, right?

I didn’t wait to hear all the facts. I believed Pauw because he is Pauw. Perhaps that’s also why the Daily Maverick decided that an angry opinion piece full of largely untested accusations was solid enough to run as if it were news.

This was my mistake.

No journalist should be trusted implicitly.

Trust in the media, however, isn’t a binary. When I remind myself that I shouldn't believe any journalist implicitly, I am not saying I should distrust all of them automatically.

Instead, I think, we should try to remember that the trustworthiness of journalists and editors is a kind of batting average; a cumulative record of having got it right more often than they’ve got it wrong, and, when they’ve got it wrong, apologising authentically rather than fudging or doubling down or refusing to apologise until forced to do so.

I suspect the Daily Maverick has cultivated a high enough average (and has issued a thorough enough apology) to move through this relatively quickly and easily, but I’m not sure how Pauw comes back from here.

He remains a formidable journalist, of course. But how much will that matter when his future targets can simply smile and ask him, and by implication every South African journalist: “Are you sure?”