ANTON HARBER: There is only one way to put out the fire of media misadventure
The Sunday Times apology, which was meant to be an elegant closure of a difficult period, is now messy, unresolved and causing distress across the industry
The Sunday Times must have been hoping that last week’s admission of wrongdoing in a series of stories dating back to 2013 would put to rest a matter that has haunted the paper and successive editors for five years. “We committed mistakes and allowed ourselves to be manipulated by those with ulterior motives,” editor Bongani Siqoko said in an unusually prominent and lengthy apology for what his predecessors had allowed to happen. The editorial has, however, had the opposite effect to what was intended: it stirred up the matter raising as many questions as it answered. Who played them, and how? Who in the Sunday Times was responsible? Was there full accountability? How could this happen just a few years after a previous 2007 inquiry into stories that went wrong (of which I was part)? Other outlets were offered the same stories but saw through the political agendas that were being foisted on them and did not run them, or covered them in a very different way. The SA National Editors Fo...
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