Reckon ye the number of the Beast

At the Grand Scaly Whale (RDM) in the old SAAN building, resplendent with Benjy’s Bungle jutting like a defiant middle finger into the Jo’burg skyline, we used the Atex electronic editing system. As with today’s zooty jobs, each of us had a password or login code to access the system. One of our cadets — later arrested, I think, in Botswana smuggling arms for the ANC — was Damien de Lange. In deference to his satanic namesake in David Seltzer’s The Omen, his login code was 666.

It was an in-house joke and De Lange was rather, uh, weird. But I recalled him today as I read Steven Friedman’s blog “Numbers, numbers everywhere and not a truth in sight?”. One facet of Steve’s argument, and I hope I’ve done him justice, is that numbers (specifically survey results) can be more misleading than enlightening, and that the media have a responsibility not to take the numbers at face value, but to interrogate and “Rubik’s Cube” them in search of the truth.

I remembered trying to tell De Lange that the name Damien, as Seltzer claimed, had no etymological connection with the English word “demon”, but rather derived from French, in its turn derived from the name of a Christian martyr called Damianus. It was, incidentally, also the name of Father Karras in The Exorcist.

But login code “666” would have nothing of it.

One of the valuable lessons we learnt reporting under the 100-plus restrictive media laws at the height of the regimes of John Vorster and PW Botha was precisely to mine any kind of data or survey results or statistics to find the real gold, the truth buried within. It was a full-scale propaganda war in them dark days and the bullshit flowed in torrents from all sides.

We also learnt to build our contacts in academia, churches, industry, the law and elsewhere — some on whom we relied on to make sense of all the crap; others because, hell, they were great for headlines and sound bites!

But digging beneath the veneer of erudition and double-blind testing demands considerable skill. These skills, though often found in business media, are dangerously sparse elsewhere. Even the big guns — The Star, Sunday Times, Pretoria News, Beeld, e.tv and, of course, Sista SABC — frequently fall woefully short in interpreting numbers.

And with Sapa and most websites merely mechanically regurgitating reports because of deadline pressures, it’s easy to see how quickly the kinds of half-truths, distortions and sloppiness Steven laments can be spread. Think of it as journalistic bird flu.

The greater danger exists where wily spin doctors weave their webs. The adage of lies, damned lies and statistics is ever present. I know — we used it to great advantage in crisis management on behalf of clients, in mining and at Business against Crime. Sometimes to reinforce our positions; other times to downplay the real scope of some cock-up. An attack by Cyril Ramaphosa or Gwede Mantashe from the NUM side was counter-balanced by stats from the Chamber of Mines. And, though the truth lay somewhere in between, both sides were usually more skilled than the journos on their phones or fax machines.

I remember burying Snuki himself under a lahar of perfectly plausible research into migratory patterns of miners worldwide. And he swallowed it up with glee.

At worst, we’d end up with a less-than-credible he-said-she-said conundrum. The readers or viewers or listeners could decide which side to believe predicated on their own prejudices. Or else the “picture” became so convoluted and labyrinthine the story was briefed or, better still, just spiked.

But there were other journalists we treated like Mozambican minefields. Them we fed to the top brass in one-on-one interviews — after carefully coaching the brass, of course.

But with the runaway skills crisis in newsrooms, subs’ rooms and on production sets today, it’s a perilous place for the truth. I’ve even seen bylined news stories get through to revise-sub level complete with the standard disclaimer that comes at the end of almost every email.

So thanks for raising the issue, Steven. Your argument is even more valid after a recent survey by a UN agency based in Zurich that showed that 88,7% of urban LSM 1 to 4 groupings in sub-Saharan Africa had an MPC (melanin preponderance co-efficient) of 14 on the Skinner Scale predisposing them to darker hues and accounting for the huge 83,2-million fewer buyers of suntan lotion with an SPF of 15 or higher.

Hold the presses! We gotta change page two.