GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The slippery slide into fake news
‘Fake headline quotes are an increasingly common characteristic of online news stories but they do more harm than good’
A good quote, scandalous or otherwise, is a mainstay of current affairs reporting. Certainly, SA suffers no shortage of them, least of all when it comes to politics. But there is an increasing tendency to attribute to politicians words and phrases they have never used, particularly when it comes to online news headlines. They might not constitute outright fake news but they are one step away from it. Take, for example, this story from Business Tech: ‘Zuma is acting like a dictator’: ANC stalwarts. On reading the story, however, there is no such quote. The closest you get is: "Speaking at a press briefing on Tuesday (4 April), ANC stalwart Cheryl Carolus said that for a president to act in this way — to sit on the side and fire rafts of people — has never happened in a democracy, only in a dictatorship." There is no direct quote of Zuma saying he is "acting like a dictator", just a second-hand reference to a remark from Carolus, in which she suggests only in a dictatorship are people...
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