TOM EATON | If it walks like a decuplet and quacks like a decuplet it’s not a smoking gun

I didn’t think it was possible, but in this short report I am going to urge you to listen to, even live by, a piece of genuine wisdom given to us by the least likely philosopher imaginable: AfriForum head prefect Ernst Roets.

Let me explain.

On Sunday, Iqbal Survé’s undead reincarnation of the once proud Weekend Argus ran a story making the startling claim that a navy warship had accidentally fired a shell from its main gun, a 76mm whopper, at the mountainside just behind the small Cape Town hamlet of Simon’s Town.

Moments later, AfriForum’s Roets tweeted the story to the 86,000 people in his digital laager, saying: “Let me guess, the president was both surprised and shocked.”

Now, at the best of times this would have been a very strange article to take at face value. The Weekend Argus, after all, is part of the stable that brought you Piet Rampedi and the Thembisa decuplets.

Indeed, no sooner had the story broken than people were questioning its validity. By Monday morning Max du Preez (who lives in the allegedly bombarded Simon’s Town) was trying to reassure the excitably credulous, tweeting that this was clearly “another thumbsuck by Iqbal Survé’s lie factory”.

Darren Olivier, a director at the African Defence Review and someone who has deep and wide-ranging knowledge about how the SA military works, was also putting out little burning piles of Iqbal all over Twitter, reporting that his contacts at the base knew nothing, that the ships and their ordnance were pointed in a direction that made the shot physically impossible, and that if a 76mm gun really had been fired at the mountain just behind suburban homes, there would be more than a few unnamed residents demanding answers.

Others needed to look no further than the report to smell a rat. Journalism professor and founder of the Mail & Guardian Anton Harber tweeted: “No named sources, no eyewitnesses, no confirmation, no details, ‘it is said’, ‘from what we hear’ ... all the signs of an Iqbal special. If you are not sceptical, you are asleep.”

Others needed to look no further than the report to smell a rat. Journalism professor and founder of the Mail & Guardian Anton Harber tweeted: 'No named sources, no eyewitnesses, no confirmation, no details, ‘it is said’, ‘from what we hear’ … all the signs of an Iqbal special. If you are not sceptical, you are asleep.'

In other words, if it walks like a decuplet and quacks like a decuplet ...

At the very least, a rational and intelligent reader would perhaps delete a tweet in which he had shared the report as a true piece of news, to wait for further evidence to emerge.

And it seemed some were seeing the light.

On Wednesday morning, for example, Olivier posted a screengrab showing that Helen Zille had retweeted Roets’s tweet to her million followers. But when I went to her feed a few hours later I could see no sign of it, suggesting someone had had a word in her ear about whether people who endlessly bemoan the state of the media should be retweeting IOL stoolwater as news.

Roets’s tweet, however, was still steadfastly visible late on Wednesday afternoon. Which is strange, given he’s always been such a vocal opponent of fake news.

In 2018, for example, he tweeted: “We need to do more to expose fake news in our midst.” In 2020, he daydreamed: “If I had a dollar for every time AfriForum was falsely accused of spreading fake news ...” Two months later he was back at it, worrying that journalism “as a collective is losing credibility because of ideological activists in senior positions who claim that they are neutral while publishing smear pieces based on fake news”.

Because of course, he’s right. It is morally dubious and intellectually cowardly to use fake news to fight your ideological battles; to present obviously false information as fact to defame your ideological foes.

I mean, if you want to mock the incompetence of the ANC you don’t have to post obvious lies, right? Of course not. All any honest critic need do is cite one of hundreds of real scandals.

No. If you’re posting fake news to try to win an ideological argument, you’re already a loser.

Which is why I think we should all try to remember that piece of Roets wisdom I mentioned at the beginning, which he tweeted in 2018.

“Fake news,” wrote Roets, “is not an argument.”

And I couldn’t agree more.