I try to defend journalism as much as I can, but damn, sometimes the media makes it hard. Exhibit A: the fact that a documentary produced by Iqbal Survé’s fiction factory, featuring the nonexistent decuplets, is in line to win an international journalism award.
On Wednesday, the SA National Editors Forum (Sanef) fired off a press release expressing its horror that the International News Media Association (INMA) had shortlisted Survé’s Baby Trade for the Global Media Awards, in the category “Best Use Of Social Media”.
That looked bad enough for the Fourth Estate, but the INMA was about to heap insult on top of injury.
Responding to Sanef’s complaint, it reportedly explained that the awards were “judging the quality of the social media campaign — not the story itself”.
In other words, when it comes to dishing out prizes to media organisations, it no longer matters whether a story is true or not. What’s important is that it used Twitter to lodge itself in lots of eyeballs.
In other words, when it comes to dishing out prizes to media organisations, it no longer matters whether a story is true or not. What’s important is that it used Twitter to lodge itself in lots of eyeballs.
Hoping to discover that the INMA is a dog-and-pony show broadcasting from Vladimir Putin’s mother’s basement, I visited its website and clicked on its board of directors.
It won’t surprise you tremendously to learn that its current president works for Rupert Murdoch, or that its treasurer is one Sandy Naudé, who runs Survé’s knock-and-drop division.
The other 28 people on the list, however, were a fairly solid sample of what we call “mainstream media”, with executives from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Sweden’s largest media group and Germany’s third-largest publisher of newspapers and magazines, as well as well-established titles in Brazil, Colombia, Norway and Belgium. Even Naspers had a look-in, with the editor of Media24’s Daily Sun currently serving as an INMA director.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that the relative size, wealth or fame of these media groups should automatically confer on them any moral respectability or journalistic integrity. Murdoch’s empire is a good example of this: something like Fox News is big, rich, famous, hugely popular and very toxic.
But what isn’t in dispute is that if your average reader were to look at this group, they would be entirely justified in believing that the INMA is very clearly a media organisation, and therefore a legitimate representative of journalism in general.
In other words, what they would see is the journalism profession rewarding a completely discredited story simply because it was published with all sorts of technological bells and whistles. They would see clicks over facts. They would see lies over truth.
No matter what the loudest and most extreme critics yell, most generally respected news sources are not staffed by corrupt shills doing the bidding of political or corporate masters.
This is not to say that they aren’t constantly leant on by vested interests and sinister agendas, and that sometimes some skulduggery slips through the cracks.
But in the broader scheme of things, I would still rather get my news from the “mainstream” than from Facebook or the wild-eyed Rasputins on YouTube whose income is directly linked to how sensational and provocative they can be, and who therefore have no incentive to provide nuance, complexity or an approximation of the truth.
And yet, for how much longer will the “mainstream” be able to defend itself against those wild accusations when, instead of condemning the fabrication of stories, it considers rewarding it?
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