ANTON HARBER: An unhappy birthday for the Thembisa 10 — and the news media
The Pretoria News’s fact-free story did enormous damage at a time when journalism is battling disinformation
This week sees an unhappy birthday for our news media industry. The Sithole Decuplets, or “Thembisa 10” as they are sometimes called, would have turned one this week — if they existed. Instead, we are marking the anniversary of the low point in SA journalism: the day Sekunjalo’s Independent Media sold us this fact-free story, which went around the world. It was not the only low point of our industry’s 200 years — we have had a few — but probably the lowest so far.
It was bad enough that the Pretoria News — whose editor, Piet Rampedi, was personally responsible for the story — allowed itself to be so spectacularly misled. But it persisted with the story even when it clearly had no basis in truth; it now maintains that the babies were the victims of human trafficking, though many months of investigation have failed to provide a single piece of credible evidence to back this conspiracy theory...
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