With criminality of the scale that entire mines have been hijacked and trains bought at billions more than their value, the cameo role of Tiso Blackstar (owner of Business Day) editors Peter Bruce and Rob Rose as victims in the state-capture project has hardly garnered any column space. At another time, surveillance of journalists, illegal acquisition of their private information and publication of defamatory fake news about them would have been a sizeable scandal. These two journalists aren’t the only ones targeted by the Gupta-aligned fake news brigade. Ferial Haffajee, the former editor of City Press, has also been a favourite of their smear campaigns, as have amaBhungane’s Sam Sole and Radio 702’s Barry Bateman. But at least the actions taken this week to enforce privacy rules led to an interesting outcome in court. Bruce, in particular, has featured in several reports on the WMC Leaks fake news website, which has been traced back to a Gupta associate. The website posted the ide...
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