» New Ombudsman

New Ombudsman

August 5th, 2007

Welcome to Joe Thloloe as the new press ombudsman. Joe is a veteran who commands enormous moral authority among journalists.

But watch out tabloids! Joe has made his views clear on the rise of the new tabloids. He sees them as following in the worst traditions of the popular newspapers aimed at black readers in the 1950s, which offered a racist diet of sex and soccer to distract the masses.

After Joe spoke out so strongly against the Daily Sun in particular at a forum about two years ago, he was invited by the paper to visit and see what they were doing. Needless to say, they did not parade their outspoken and somewhat foul-mouthed publisher, Deon du Plessis, at the meeting, but put on quite a different face.

I have not heard Joe on the subject since them, but I would guess that he and the tabloids are going to be watching each other with some caution in the coming months.

Joe’s appointment represents on element in an important strengthening of the printed media’s self-regulatory machinery. In the early 1990s, much of the Press Council machinery which had been built up to ward off the apartheid government was dismantled in favour of a part-time Ombudsman whose brief was kept very narrow. This was largely the result of a push by then Sunday Times editor Ken Owen to free the media from as much regulation and control as possible.

But recently it has become clear that the media had made itself vulnerable by not having adequate self-regulation in place. In many of the recent reporting controversies, the Ombudsman’s ultra-narrow brief kept him out of the scrap, and that made self-regulation often appear toothless.

Now there is a Press Council which appoints the Ombudsman and an Appeal Board headed by an about-to-retire judge. And Joe, who has never been afraid to speak his mind, will no doubt take advantage of this strengthened office to make his mark.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Media regulation, Print

1 Comment Add your own

1. Shasha Modike | September 4th, 2007 at 1:36 pm

daily sun should be a broadsheet paper.

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Anton Harber: Media

Professor Anton Harber directs the Journalism and Media Studies Programme at Wits University. He is former editor of the Mail & Guardian.
Full bio

Daily newspaper sales, South Africa
(Ave sales Jul-Dec)
1960 - 681 053 (Population 17,3m)
1970 - 723 566 (22m)
1980 - 803 229 (27,5m)
1990 - 1 214 396 (35,2m)
2000 - 1 117 886 (44m)
2006 - 1 600 000 (47,3m)
2011 - 1 310 000 (49m)

(Sources: ABC and nationmaster.com)

“It was pure political theatre. The excited room was filled with government officials, government consultants, quasi-government agencies, politicians and pupils from government schools. As if on cue, the room rang with applause as one education victory after another was claimed. This was, after all, the annual drama in which the minister of basic education appears on stage to announce the Grade 12 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results …” - Educationist Jonathan Jansen, one of the few with the credibility to look critically at this “celebratory orgy of mediocrity”.

“The (Incwala) ceremony is cloaked in secrecy and marks the (Swaziland) king’s return to public life after a period of withdrawal and spiritual contemplation. Among its highlights is a symbolic demonstration by the king of his power and dominance in a process involving his penetration of a black bull … But last year’s selected bull, according to a recent account from a whistle-blowing Incwala initiate, objected strongly, and threw off Africa’s last absolute monarch.” - Some surprises in this (un-bylined) account of Swaziland politics in Southern African Report

“When the Great Zucchini arrived that Saturday morning, Don had no idea who he was. Frankly, he didn’t look like a great anything. He looked like a house painter, Don thought, with some justification. He wears no costume. He was in painter’s pants, a coffee-stained shirt and a two-day growth of beard. He toted his beat-up props in beat-up steamer trunks, with ripped faux leather and broken hinges hanging askew.” - A classic of magazine profiling, by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post.

Diepsloot (Jonathan Ball, 2011)

Diesploot: Of Frogs and Fractals, a public lecture at the University of Johannesburg, 4 August 2011

Troublemakers - The Best of South Africa’s Investigative Journalism (Jacana, 2101), edited by Anton Harber and Margaret Renn

Introduction - The Troublemakers: An account of the rise of a new wave of investigative journalism in South Africa.

What is Left Unsaid: Reporting the South African HIV Epidemic, edited by Kristin Palitza, Natalie Ridgard, Helen Struthers and Anton Harber (Fanele, 2010)