TRIAL BY NEWSPAPER

An unsavoury case of ‘trial by newspaper’ has been unfolding in the Swazi Observer this week.

It began on Tuesday (14 August 2007) with a report of a man from Manzini who says he was shot at by police while driving his car late on Sunday night. The Observer quotes the man saying that he was almost forced off the road by a police car.

Not knowing for sure that the people in the car were police officers, the man drove away at speed. There was then a car chase in which the police were said to have fired bullets at the man’s car.

The man managed to escape the police and eventually he went home where he discovered that some of the bullets fired by the police had hit his car. The man told the Observer that he later reported the incident to the police, but the police denied any knowledge of the matter.

At this point we have a speculative news report that mostly rests on the testimony of the man. A reporter and a photographer were able to interview the man and take a picture of what appears to be a bullet hole in the car. The police were asked for their side of the story but were unable to confirm the man’s story.

At this point it appears to be a legitimate news report. But next day, the Observer took the incident in an entirely new direction.

In a report headed ‘Readers react to businessman story’, the Observer (15 August 2007) says it was ‘inundated with mixed responses’ to the story and that readers were ‘particularly divided on the alleged car chase’.

It is noticeable that the original report as published took the story from the man as fact. By the next day in its report it had become an ‘alleged’ chase.

The report then goes on to state, ‘Most readers felt they were not convinced by the reasons offered by the businessman as to why he did not stop when he realised he was being followed by the police.’

At this point in the story the honesty of the driver is being doubted. The problem here, of course, is that readers are in no position to judge one way or another on the incident. They were not witnesses to the incident and have no personal knowledge to draw on. All they have is what was written in the newspapers and as I have argued before the accuracy of the Swazi news media cannot be trusted.

Even though the readers cannot be judges in this case, that does not stop the Observer promising that it will be publishing a collection of comments from its readers the following day (Thursday).

But by Thursday (16 August 2007) events had taken a new turn. The man had been arrested and charged by police for a series of traffic offences. The Observer reported he had been taken to court and released on E1,000 bail. Even though a court case was now pending the Observer repeated many of the comments from readers it had published the previous day.

Then illogically, it ran a note saying that it could no longer publish the new comments from readers as it had intended ‘because the matter is now before the court.’

So to recap: over three days the Observer published a story based on a driver who says he was chased and shot at by police. It then published comments from readers who did not believe the man’s story (even though readers had no way of knowing one way or the other what the truth might be). Finally, the newspaper reported that the man had been charged with motoring offences and appeared in court.

Throughout this reporting the Observer had shown complete disregard for the rights of the driver. It was unfair coverage because it chose to doubt the truth of the man’s story. It did this, not by sending a reporter to interview and question him closely about his story, but instead by publishing comments from readers. Finally, even after the man had appeared in court it repeated some of the comments made by readers doubting the truth of the man’s story.

The Observer has stopped being a newspaper that reports on facts; instead it has become the carrier of gossip. It is in effect encouraging its readers to gossip about the incident and to give unfounded opinions. This is in much the same way that we might gossip about someone we know when we are with our friends in the pub or coffee shop.

By encouraging and printing this gossip, the Observer has damaged the reputation of the man. It has done this by careless and unfair reporting. It has put the man on trial and found him guilty. For its own reasons, the Observer chose to encourage readers to judge the truthfulness of his story, even though the readers had no way of knowing what the truth of the matter could be. By concentrating on the readers’ doubts the Observer has found the man guilty of lying. That is the job of the courts, not the media, and that is why this is a case of ‘trial by newspaper’.