Dishing up the sloppy seconds

Everybody makes mistakes.

I know that only too well. How the hell I am alive today I have no idea. I am a Monarch of Mistakes, Emperor of Errors, Pharaoh of Fuck-Ups. Some I have walked away from unscathed. Some I barely stood up from. Others I have survived by nothing short of God’s interference. And I mean that with the deepest reverence.

As a father, mentor, lecturer, coach and writer I encourage risk, and risk means making mistakes. Mistakes are the way every living creature learns or has learnt or will learn — from your friendly local amoeba just pseudopodding its way through life to Jesus Christ himself. But the whole point of making mistakes is to learn — so you know what not to do in future.

OK, so given we all err, and making allowances for our transgressions in abiding hope of learning, there comes a point at which, by her own admission, even Mother Teresa drew a line and said: “No more!”

But judging by the rate the same mistakes are made again and again in our media day by day, “everybody” is working 36 hours a day, nine days a week, and the population of “everybody” numbers in the billions.

The profusion and the extent of mistakes “everybody” is making ranges from the purely sloppy to the unforgivable. And it is happening right now as I write this and as you read it. And it is just not good enough.

OK, so I am highly critical (and will find out on Friday at noon what happens to critics like me), but I resent being treated with the kind of disrespect that sees 27 glaring journalistic fuck-ups on one page of IOL! And I’m not talking about the little oopsies. I’m talking about sixth-grade English, fictional names, teasers contradicting full stories, subbing abortions, wrong dates, nonsensical headlines, missing words, wrong pictures, non-existent hotlinks … the list goes on and on.

Right this instant — 7.55pm, Wednesday January 9 2008 — there are no fewer than eight unpardonables on News24‘s front page, before you even reach the “Special Focus” section and without cross-checking against the full stories! On weekends the error rate soars.

And it’s not just the cybermedia. SABC radio and TV, e.tv, 702 and Highveld float on rafts of errors. I can only read two of our 11 official languages, but it’s as bad in Afrikaans as it is in English. Gutenberg only knows what it’s like in other languages. Some media are better, but even the Mail & Guardian (which has a whole week to ensure it is nothing less than 100%) drops the ball from time to time in silly Journalism 101 ways. Turf that was once ruled by the neighbourhood knock ‘n drops is now regularly patrolled by any paper from the Sunday Times and Rapport to the Star and Beeld . Magazines are not exempt either — though some try harder than others.

As senior court reporter on the Pretoria News in 1978 I had to cover a fraud case in which two Jo’burg liquidators were accused, jointly and severally, of “misrepresenting to the Master of the Supreme Court that they were entitled to fees in excess of the set amounts” (the charges were more prolix so I had to run that bit past the magistrate to get by being only eight words over the 20-word intro limit that was our editorial policy).

That was a big story in those days. Today I doubt the case would have even made it to the cops, but that’s another issue, isn’t it?

Anyway, the case was big enough for the defence team to be made up of Mervyn King, SC, Johann Kriegler, SC, and Isie Maisels, QC.

My mistake was not to warn our sister Argus Group papers not to fuck with the copy. A down-table sub on the Star did just that. It cost the Star an undisclosed but large amount of money to settle out of court.

By the way, it was also a Pretoria News policy that every new wannabe hack first went to magistrate’s courts. No matter how many degrees you had, if you were starting in journalism (and the News at that stage was the best training paper in the country), you started in courts. That’s where you learn accuracy. The same is true today.

But we are all tweezers and cotton wool and ag-shame-she-was-disadvantaged today. I guess that explains why 90% of the newbies I come in contact with know zip about principles of precedence, rules of evidence, defamation and so on. In fact, most of the senior editors on papers I know (no names, no pack drill) don’t know when an accused can be identified and when not. My sense is they get away with it because they’re big with big bucks backing them, justice is so inaccessible in South Africa and the poor and unsophisticated just don’t know their rights have been infringed.

That and the fact it happens all the time, so we take it as the norm.

The editors don’t give a shit and unqualified, inexperienced pencil-pushers and Quark-jockeys don’t know the difference. And everyone gets a byline. And the standards just keep on plummeting.

Sadly, it’s all become symptomatic of the national malaise. Making mistakes has become an acceptable norm, not a learning process any more. Ubuntu says it’s all OK, as long as you show you’re sorry, but, what the hell, good enough is, well, good enough. And if this year is not quite as good as it was last year, well … what can you do?

And you and I get dished the sloppy seconds. Maybe that’s why we’re a little, er, circumspect about who blogs on Thought Leader — at least we try to make new mistakes each time, now don’t we?