TOM EATON: So that’s old Karyn and Billy ... heh heh heh

Jacob Zuma’s private prosecution of Billy Downer and Karyn Maughan has been postponed until 2023, but I suspect the former president got the thing he wanted most from the whole endeavour: a certain photograph, which he will keep on his phone so that he can stare at it in the small hours when the whispers in his head grow loud.         

The picture itself is unremarkable, showing Downer and Maughan standing side by side, somewhat impassively in the dock at the high court in Pietermaritzburg. But for Zuma’s courtiers, crowding around to kiss his stained and unravelling hem, it was a trophy straight out of their wildest persecution fantasies.

Indeed, for some it probably seemed too good to be true, perhaps a cruel bit of Photoshop circulated by Stratcom to demoralise the revolution. After all, if you live in the Zumaverse, court cases are things you don’t appear at, and the picture would have asked more questions than it answered.

Why, for instance, would Downer and Maughan go to court when they could simply force taxpayers to fund endless delays, like normal people? Why hadn’t they done the most basic form of self-care and paid a cadre to write them a sick note? And where was their crowd of supporters outside the court, holding misspelled signs upside down and waiting for the free lunch they’d been offered?

For Zuma, however, none of that mattered. It wouldn’t even have mattered that Maughan and Downer only stayed in the dock for a few hours. What mattered was that they’d been there, and he had the picture to prove it; an image he could look at over and over again, massaging it into himself like balm for the supernaturally thin skin that seems to afflict old-world political patriarchs.

The proprietor of Zuma’s mildewed reputation laundry, Mzwanele Manyi, explained to the nation that the prosecution was all about “strengthening the criminal justice system”. You know, the way Zuma has always been about strengthening the criminal justice system.

But the very fact that he was there, scrubbing away at Zuma’s legacy, splashing yet more bleach onto those stains that simply look more awful the further you get from them, underlined that this prosecution isn’t about justice. It is about losing face and trying to regain it; about trying to claw back honour pawned long ago; about collecting on all the petty accounts that the injured masculine hoards and obsesses over.

Of course, none of this is any consolation to Maughan and her colleagues, many of whom see this cynical attempt to divert attention away from Zuma’s corruption trial as a direct attack on the freedom of the press.

In the past few days many have shown their support for Maughan by tweeting that “journalism is not a crime”. The trouble, however, is that that’s not always true.

For starters, consider the crime committed against our collective intellect on the weekend when former SABC political editor Abby Makoe splattered pure, diluted sycophancy across the Independent Group in an opinion piece with a title North Korean propagandists might have felt was a little on the nose: “A victorious NDZ 2022 will usher in a brighter future for all.”

Yet even that headline quickly started looking like cool understatement as Makoe insisted that Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma “is capable of walking with kings and queens and still keeping her common touch”, and that “everything she touches turns to gold”.

It would have been funny if it wasn’t a reminder that metaphorical crimes against reason are only the start of it, and that despite the well-intentioned tweets of Maughan’s supporters, journalism can sometimes get awfully close to aiding and abetting literal criminality, whether it be cheerleading for wars or openly lying to overthrow legitimate elections.

All of which is why I would like to humbly suggest a slightly tweaked tweet, namely: “Honest journalism is not a crime — yet.” Because that’s the endgame of tyrants.

For example, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan is emulating the stifling edicts of Vladimir Putin, pushing through a law that will put people in jail for up to three years for disseminating “misleading” information. Critics of the law point out that its wording is so vague that it could easily include even the mildest criticism of the state, but this seems par for the course in a country that is notorious for its aggressive silencing of free speech and independent journalism.

Vague wording is also hurting the media in other ways, not least in the vagueness of that very phrase. “The media” has become an almost meaningless idea, incorporating, as it does, an immense spectrum populated by incorruptible crimefighters, hard-working professionals, ambivalent stenographers, and sociopaths who’ll swear to literally anything if the money is good enough.

This is why when strongmen and their useful idiots denounce the media as corrupt or in thrall to corporate or foreign interests, or when Donald Trump claims, as he did in 2019, that it is the “enemy of the people”, there can be no blanket rebuttal or refutation from liberals or honest journalists. I’m not sure anyone endorsing a Zuma puppet is an enemy of the SA people, but lord knows they’re not exactly helping.

Still, the good ones remain; honest, as impartial as any of us can be; exhausted but maintaining. I believe Maughan is one of them. And she has my thanks, for holding the door no matter what.

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.