Niren Tolsi’s moving speech takes aim at the state of SA journalism

Journalist Niren Tolsi, awarded the Ruth First Fellowship earlier this year, gave the annual Ruth First Lecture at the University of Witwatersrand on Thursday evening.

The multi-award winning freelance journalist gave a talk called Fire and Media: Towards a new South African journalism.

The talk addressed the way South African publications cover fires, beginning by looking at the Knysna Fire but going on to use fire as a metaphor for journalism in South Africa as a whole.

The way three black children who died in the fire was reported on is juxtaposed with the reporting, in much greater detail, on a white family who had succumbed to the same fate.

The speech moves on to question the current state of South African journalism, which he says has become “toxic” – looking at social media, outrage culture, click-bait, and the “digitisation and atomisation” of media.

READ MORE: Investigative journalism in Africa crippled by arrests, persecution

“There was, once, an optimism that technology was wholly good for journalism. But we have learnt, through pro-Gupta online trolls, paid-Twitter, fake news sites, the emergence of social media influencers, and Russian social bots that we cannot trust social media,” Tolsi warns.

“The numbers — of followers and interactions — used to grade our online relevance and success were untruths. Journalism had not checked its facts when unquestioningly embracing technology.

“We are now one-dimensional in our knowledge and information gathering.”

It also looks at the way journalism, in the past and present, “colluded with power” – calling the history of apartheid-era South African journalism an “undistinguished history for which South African journalism has never properly atoned”.

The speech can be read in its entirety here.

(Compiled by Daniel Friedman)

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.