Who is a Journalist ?
I need to start with a disclaimer: I have a dog in the race I am about to bet on. I am a board member of Africa Check, the fact-checking operation that runs from our journalism department at Wits University.
Africa Check promotes slow journalism: before your rush into print or on air, take a deep breath and make sure you have double-checked your facts. If you don’t, there are a bunch of pedants who will be onto you, investigating where you sourced any facts and whether they stand up to scrutiny, and publishing it all on a website. They do the same for public figures: check out party manifestoes in elections, President Jacob Zuma’s state of the nation address and Western Cape Premier Helen Zille’s provincial one.
They
are scrupulously nonpartisan, pointing out when the details are correct
as often as when they are wrong. They took on the New York Times and
showed that their source for a claim that there were 5-million illegal
immigrants in SA was dubious, at best.
Sometimes they even have fun, checking out April Fools claims, or whether Joburg is in fact "the biggest man-made forest in the world". (It isn’t.) We all make mistakes, particularly at the kind of speed news travels at these days. Smart people apologise and fix it quickly (though the New York Times, famous for once correcting a misspelt name in a theatre review 60 years after the error, didn’t).
I need to start with a disclaimer: I have a dog in the race I am about to bet on. I am a board member of Africa Check, the fact-checking operation that runs from our journalism department at Wits University.
Africa Check promotes slow journalism: before your rush into print or on air, take a deep breath and make sure you have double-checked your facts. If you don’t, there are a bunch of pedants who will be onto you, investigating where you sourced any facts and whether they stand up to scrutiny, and publishing it all on a website. They do the same for public figures: check out party manifestoes in elections, President Jacob Zuma’s state of the nation address and Western Cape Premier Helen Zille’s provincial one.
Sometimes they even have fun, checking out April Fools claims, or whether Joburg is in fact "the biggest man-made forest in the world". (It isn’t.) We all make mistakes, particularly at the kind of speed news travels at these days. Smart people apologise and fix it quickly (though the New York Times, famous for once correcting a misspelt name in a theatre review 60 years after the error, didn’t).
