News24’s public editor George Claassen’s inbox has been flooded with complaints about a column published about why we should all know who George Floyd is and if we don’t we are part of the problem. He explains why it was acceptable to publish.
Does the personal physical isolation brought about by the Covid-19 lockdown also affect our mindset, strengthening osmotic walls around what we believe and what we allow our thinking membranes to be exposed to and permeate?
This came to mind over the past fortnight when readers, some clearly seriously and aggressively upset via the grapevine of social media animosity and invective, flooded my inbox with complaints about News24’s Lifestyle and Entertainment editor Herman Eloff’s column on who George Floyd is – and why, if we don’t know who he is, we are part of the problem.
Osmosis is the diffusion of water molecules through a semi-permeable membrane from an area “in which they are at a high concentration to a region where they are at a lower concentration,” as defined by Scientific American’s Science Desk Reference. How permeable is the mind to the flow of ideas through the cognitive membranes we build around us, I asked myself when reading some of the profanities hurled at Herman, myself and News24 in general. The column was published four days after Floyd died and cut to the heart of racial intolerance and each and everyone’s responsibility on standing up against racism.
The weeklong vilification of Eloff, all by white South Africans, more, or less equally shared by English and Afrikaans speakers, reminded me of Christopher Wylie’s description in his book Mindf*ck, about the gated communities we occupy. “What we’re seeing is a cognitive segregation, where people exist in their own informational ghettos. We are seeing the segregation of our realities. If Facebook is a ‘community’, it is a gated community.”
Eloff was strongly supported by Stellenbosch University’s Professor Amanda Gouws, one of South Africa’s most astute political analysts, who explained in a column in Die Burger, later expanded on in the Daily Maverick, “why we should all know George Floyd’s name”.
From a media-ethical viewpoint, why was Eloff’s column acceptable to be published by News24? From the outset, it would clearly threaten the osmotic tolerance of some whites to allow any idea through their membranes, requiring a serious look at the filters put in place to sift out “dangerous ideas”. Over the past week, I have tried to set out why there is such a thing as protected comment in the media, a fact surprisingly not accepted by many of the complainants who prefer to live in the informational ghettos Wylie describes.
Herman Eloff’s column is fair comment in line with the guidelines of protected comment of the Press Council, as set out in its Press Code, to which News24 subscribes. The code clearly states the following in section 7 about “Protected comment”:
7.1 The media shall be entitled to comment upon or criticise any actions or events of public interest; and
7.2 Comment or criticism is protected even if it is extreme, unjust, unbalanced, exaggerated and prejudiced, as long as it is without malice, is on a matter of public interest, has taken fair account of all material facts that are either true or reasonably true, and is presented in a manner that it appears clearly to be comment.
The column ironically also led to a serious contravention of the subclause on hate speech of section 16 of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution, protecting freedom of expression. The scurrilous and malignant hatred spewing from some of the complainants, the death threats, the astonishing intolerance and vituperation, even one swearing attacker comparing Eloff to being a “joiner as in the Anglo-Boer War” (my translation), confirmed quite a measure of truth in the words of George Orwell:
“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
Another irony: some of the most aggressive attacks on Eloff came from complainants with French Huguenot surnames, missing the point why the Huguenots fled from France in the 17th century, to escape intolerance.
A majority of the complainants wanted News24 to immediately remove the column. Repress it. Cover the reflection Eloff was casting like a heliographer to our conscience. News24 has a clear policy on removal of published material, perfectly in line with the South African Press Code. Section 1.12 states, “The media shall not be obliged to remove any content which is not unlawfully defamatory.”
News24’s policy on removal of articles and preserving its archives is that it “subscribes to a policy whereby our electronic archives are meticulously preserved. We believe that it is in the public interest to retain these records. We do not remove articles which were lawfully published merely because their continued availability causes inconvenience. Where material developments have taken place rendering the original article misleading, we will amend the original story in order to reflect such developments, provided that proof of such developments are provided to News24.”
Adds the editor-in-chief of News24, Adriaan Basson: “In an era of mis- and disinformation, it becomes incredibly important to preserve the integrity of our digital archives. Just because the medium is digital, doesn’t mean we can remove articles.”
One last observation, in the words of the father of modern economic philosophy, John Stuart Mill, very applicable to opinion pieces that may offend:
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error” (On Liberty).
– Claassen is News24’s public editor and a board member of the Organization of Newsombudsmen and Standards Editors.
