Introduction

Recently, Business Day newspaper ran a series of four articles about Wits University and the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (Saica). The first hard news story (see here) ran on Tuesday 4 November and, subsequently, two further hard news stories ran on Wednesday 5 November (see here and here). The paper also published an editorial (here) on the issue, on the Wednesday. Individually, each article displays many of the characteristics that define poor reportage. Collectively, they constitute a good case study for better understanding weak journalism and how the pursuit of ‘news' (read: sensation) often acts to compromise sound journalistic policy and practice.

I would recommend reading all four pieces before continuing.

The story

According to the Business Day, the story in essence is that Saica has threatened to withdraw its accreditation of the Wits School of Accounting. The reasons offered by Business Day in evidence of this varied, however, depending on which story you read.

The 4 November story stated that Saica had cited "a deterioration of standards". Later in that story, it stated that Saica, "...after a monitoring visit to the university in August", concluded that "the programmes did not comply with its standards and that steps would be taken to withdraw its accreditation". The newspaper ran several street posters advertising this story. I paraphrase, but they ran along the lines: "Standards drop at Wits".

The story cited the key findings of the report, which revolved entirely around staffing issues and did not mention standards.

In contrast, the 5 November story cited a different set of reasons. Contradicting the previous day's story, it stated: "Saica was not concerned about the standard of the Wits qualification, but that its severe human resources constraints would eventually cause standards to fall." The second story did not elaborate on what exactly was meant by human resources constraints.

The second 5 November hard news story (the third in total) provided a more substantial explanation of the human resources constraints, in addressing the problem more broadly (i.e. outside of Wits). It said that "the crux of the matter is that the university is having trouble finding qualified CAs to teach its Saica accredited programme". It continued to paraphrase a Saica representative saying that (and this is not a direct quote): "This is indicative of a wider national and international shortage of qualified CAs, and so of CAs who are able to teach..." The vast majority of points raised in this story were generic and were applied equally to all universities in South Africa.

The editorial published on 5 November put forward the newspaper's opinion on the situation. The gist of it was that if the human resources problem at Wits is bad, it is probably indicative of a far broader and more substantial crisis.

The story beneath the story

By reading all four articles it becomes apparent how the newspaper got the story. The second 5 November article revealed that a confidential document "dealing with Saica's scheduled three-yearly academic review of the Wits School of Accounting" was leaked to the paper and other media. The 5 November editorial stated: "The rights and wrongs of the Wits dispute remain murky. Clearly someone, whether inside the university or inside Saica, is so unhappy they felt it necessary to leak all the gory details of Saica's correspondence with Wits to the media."

Significantly, it follows that line with these two:

"But there was nothing special about this particular investigation: Saica probes each of the 10 universities it accredits every three years. And it has confirmed that Wits is not the only one whose accreditation is under threat."

More about that later.

The problem

I have provided here only the most basic framework for the four articles. Each hard news story carries a number of suitably outraged comments from various members of the accounting profession, decrying the situation, and a number of ominous warnings loaded with appropriately powerful adjectives, designed, no doubt, to make the story a little more ‘newsworthy' ("...a crippling blow to the university and lay low what is arguably the profession most fundamental to the economic success of South Africa"). But it is the basics that are most important here.

The first and most fundamental problem is also the most obvious: the hard news story published on 4 November was palpably wrong, as both hard news stories published the following day made evident: by Saica's own explicit admission, there was nothing wrong with Wits' standards.

Compare the headline for the 4 November story - ‘Saica threat to Wits accounting school as its standards fall' - with this quote from a Saica senior executive, taken from the second 5 November hard news story:

"Quite a lot of them (universities) have got human resource issues. It's not really about standards exactly, it's about human resource issues and a concern that standards will fall eventually if they are not corrected."

And, later, this quote from the same person:

"All our universities are experiencing problems... (and) the biggest problem is teaching at postgraduate level... where finding qualified and appropriately experienced people is becoming increasingly difficult because of a private and public sector shortage of CAs. One should be very, very sorry for academic institutions."

Quite clearly, the first headline and, more damagingly, the street poster that reflected it, got it wrong. And they got it wrong because the story was badly written, emphasised certain facts at the expense of others and generated the impression that declining standards were the problem, not a skills deficit. No doubt this was done because a story about declining standards at a leading academic institution was presumed to be more ‘newsworthy' than a story about a generic problem with no specific protagonist.

(Significantly, implicit in that impression, is that idea that incompetence and maladministration on the part of Wits was to blame, when clearly, according to Saica, the problem is a generic one. Indeed, the quote from the senior Saica executive, above, suggests Wits is a victim, rather than a culprit.)

In turn, the consequence of this was that, in the eyes of the public, the impression was created that Wits - and Wits in particular - was in the grips of a crisis, and that the crisis involved declining standards. When, in truth, the story was all those institutions which teach accounting were suffering from the same generic skills crisis.

That is the problem on a fundamental level, but there are others.

For one, there is the newspaper's honesty with its readers. The various stories were based on a leaked report: leaked - by the paper's own admission - by a person who was "unhappy"; in other words, someone with an agenda. Now, the leaked report might well be internally coherent and could be reported on in an of itself, but it has a context and it is quite clear from the relevant articles that no effort was made to either set that context out for the reader (as opposed to a passing remark) or to better understand and report on that context (the 4 November story carries some comment from Wits, the two 5 November articles have none). That is just poor journalism: misleading and unbalanced.

It also serves to conflate the context with the report, no doubt the very purpose behind the leak in the first place. The two - the context and the report - might well be comparable (i.e. our ‘unhappy' anonymous leak might well have a good case) but it just as well might not (i.e. he or she might not) and, without comment from both sides, the very least the paper should have done was to set that context out explicitly.

It is quite feasible that what happened was the following: a disgruntled individual leaked the report to various media outlets. No doubt, it was accompanied by much invective and personal experience. The Business Day, driven as all our newspapers are to report the sensational as opposed to the salient, felt under pressure to capitalise on what looked like a juicy story before any other paper did. So it ran the 4 November story: ‘Saica threat to Wits accounting school as its standards fall'. It did so in a rush. In turn, it misrepresented the facts and the relevant sub-editor - seeing a dramatic headline - pounced. Before you could say ‘press ombudsman', a general problem became a specific one; and the nature of the issue morphed from skills deficit to declining standards. The long the short of it is anyone driving along the road and seeing the relevant poster would have got completely the wrong idea.

And so the news monster was duly fed.

An opinion without basis

The fact that the first and second hard news stories are irreconcilable did not stop Business Day offering an opinion on them. Ironically, as alluded to above, it was the editorial that made a number of relevant points which should have been in the first paragraph of the 4 November hard news story. Specifically the quote identified above:

"But there was nothing special about this particular investigation: Saica probes each of the 10 universities it accredits every three years. And it has confirmed that Wits is not the only one whose accreditation is under threat."

The fact that the report was leaked by a disgruntled individual should also have been made.

These two points are critical to anyone trying to properly contextualise the story.

But there is another, more fundamental problem with the editorial: it is misguided; at least so far as it relates to the facts it presented just a day earlier. Let us assume, as is apparent from the decision to publish a second and third article on the issue, that the newspaper realised it had overextended itself and the reason for Saica's intervention had, in fact, been staff shortages and not declining standards. The paper reported that Wits had until 31 January to respond to Saica's report (another contradictory statement - the 5 November story says the university has "until the end of this month" - so who knows the truth, but let's go with the first date for the sake of argument).

But hang on. Wits has an option (indeed, an obligation) to respond to the report? In other words, the report has made certain findings and the university hasn't yet responded to them. Surely one cannot gauge the extent of the problem without properly assessing the university's response?

I am not suggesting that a story on the report itself be canned until the university had responded, but if the purpose of the report is to better direct policy then it is unfair to suggest it is an end within itself, as the hard news stories did. The headline of the third hard news story would seem to confirm that this was the purpose behind the report: "Saica wants to keep CA brand's credibility". Once again the editorial gives the game away, when it says "underlying it all" are problems "beyond the capacity of any one institution to address".

Who would have thought that after reading the 4 November story?

The merging of the context (and, just to be explicit, by context I mean whatever was conveyed to the newspaper by the person who leaked the report) and the report itself plays itself out in a number of other ways. Consider, for example, the suggestion in the editorial that, to fix the problem, will require that the university's bosses "acknowledge errors they have made in both their appointments to the school and its faculty, and in their attitude to the professionals who keep the school of accounting going."

That they made errors in their appointments? Where did that come from? None of the hard news stories addressed this issue, or provided any evidence in support of it. Even if they did, the university's explanation wasn't carried, so how do they know which appointments were made in "error"? It is a powerful example of the context trumping the hard news. That sort of mistake is easer to explain in an editorial, which is not subject to the objective requirements of hard news, but against the backdrop of those hard news stories mentioned above, it gives the game away.

Conclusion

One should read the four articles as a progression. The first completely overextended itself and represents what happens to considered journalism when the drive to be ‘newsworthy' dominates a desire to be accurate. The second and third represent far more considered pieces, although by now the damage had been done and thus they only acted to compound the problem. But at least they got the reasoning right, if not apologetically (their failure to publish Wits' position remains problematic). And the fourth - the editorial - suggests that with time and a little effort, not to mention the lack of pressure to produce a front page banner headline (who reads the editorial anyway), the same journalist who produced the first story - ‘standards fall at Wits' - was quite capable of considered reasoning and writing - ‘a skills problem beyond the capacity of one institution to solve'.

The contrast between the first and last articles is profound, and tells you everything you need to know.

Postscript

On 6 November Business Day ran a fifth article on the issue - a hard news story titled: ‘SA has to find 22000 more accountants, institute warns'. The story makes no mention of Wits but describes the extent of the accounting skills crisis facing South Africa: according to Saica, South Africa needs an additional 22 000 accountants. It is the story Business Day should have run on 4 November. The leaked report might well have been used to illustrate the problem with regards to Wits - in and of itself, the report certainly was newsworthy - but the story was clearly the one run on 6 November - about a skills crisis; Wits was merely a practical example. The pursuit of the ‘newsworthy', however, subverted that and Wits became the story. Over the next three days the real issue would emerge. The upshot of it all is that those people who did not carefully follow the story's development, as I have done here, and who only read the 4 November article or its accompanying poster, would have had an entirely warped understanding of the problem and of who was to blame.

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