Believe, but not too much, especially if you’re a journalist

If there is one piece of advice I would pass along – were I ever asked to share my accumulated “wisdom” – it would be: never hold on too strongly to an opinion or a belief.

Why? Because once life forces you to change, you won’t experience the pain or the trauma you would otherwise do. Everyone has beliefs and opinions, but there are probably two places where you don’t need them – and where they could actively cause you harm: flying a plane or writing a news story.

It’s obvious that getting a heavier-than-air object to move through that medium and being attached to what is, to all intents and purposes, a flying bomb, requires only factual, logical thinking.

Push switch up for “on”; down for “off”. Many journalists have “opinions” which define who they are. They are “activists” or evangelists for one cause or another. In the process, they see no other view or, if they do, countenance no argument in support of other views.

Some of these hacks do all right out of their activist journalism; others are eventually found out and their careers crash and burn. And you don’t have to search for the black boxes to discover why.

It may sound quaint or archaic now, but news (and newspaper reporting specifically at that time, because there were few competitors) was described decades ago by the Washington Post as the “first rough draft of history”.

And, as a reporter, I was trained to understand that meant: get it right. (It worries me that I once heard an online journalist say it was more important to “be first than to be right”.)

It was also drummed into me that, whatever my own feelings were, I had to leave them at the door to the office. Robin Drew, my bureau chief in the Argus Africa News Service in Zimbabwe in the ’80s, told me: “There is always another side. It may make you uncomfortable, but it is there and it has a right to be heard.”

I saw, first hand, why that is important when I went to interview Gora Ebrahim of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) on his return from exile. I was working for Durban’s Sunday Tribune newspaper at the time and Ebrahim had a Natal connection, so it made sense.

But it also opened my eyes to a side of South African politics – and specifically liberation politics – which wasn’t being covered at all by most of South Africa’s newspapers.

That was partly because of the times – the early ’90s – and the fact the media was in love with Nelson Mandela and couldn’t afford to ignore the National Party, which was still running the country and moving towards eventual democracy.

When I returned to the office, where I had a desk in the Sunday Star newsroom, that paper’s news editor, Peter Wellman, was incandescent with rage when I told him where I’d been. He looked at me and said: “You shouldn’t be giving this clown the oxygen of publicity!”, before storming off.

The story ran in the Trib, but when my copy was made available to the Sunday Star, Wellman spiked it.

Wellman was a member of the ANC and of the SA Communist Party who were bitter enemies of the PAC. He was also one of the finest news editors I have worked with … but he put his personal politics before his duty to that first draft of history.

He believed, strongly. It’s just as well he never lived to see what became of “his” ANC … he would have been hurt and traumatised.

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