“… the case against Pistorius
seems to be changing from what it originally seemed to be”, wrote De Wet
Potgieter and Sipho Hlongwane in the Daily Maverick on Friday.
But whose case exactly seemed to
be changing?
Certainly there are many cases.
There is the official police
case – that a woman had been killed in a shooting at the home of Oscar
Pistorius and – it must go without saying despite our experience to the
contrary in many other investigations – the police were busting their guts to
determine what really happened and who is culpable for the death of Reeva
Steenkamp.
At first brush, the police
appear to be approaching this case by the book, even to the extent of
communicating a couple of times with media covering the case hours after the shooting.
The involvement of a high profile individual almost intuitively raises concerns
about favouritism in how a case is investigated and prosecuted. There is
nothing yet which suggests that Pistorius’s version was being favoured by the
police. On the contrary, the police took the unusual step of refuting a
suggestion that they were responsible for putting out the initial claim Ms
Steenkamp was killed in a suspected burglary at Pistorius’s house.
There is the social media case –
a rambling mix of fact, prejudice, speculation, black humour, reflections on
domestic violence, gun laws, national icons, and the issue of “known and
unknown” on a range of levels. Nothing that was tweeted or shared in other ways
was a first-hand account by a citizen journalist. Instead the Twitterverse relied
on traditional journalism sources both within South Africa and globally and
simply retweeted what working journalists were posting.
If the notion of restorative
justice is to have any value, we must acknowledge that there is also the case
that the Steenkamp family faces as they are forced to come to terms with the
devastating loss of a loved one in such tragic circumstances.
But it is the commercial media
behaviour that is especially worrying and where, perhaps inadvertently, Potgieter
and Hlongwane’s claim about a changing case has merit.
From the start the media case –
or the case as the media reported it – was tentative, stymied, reflecting the
lack of resources and training that have characterised the commercial media in
our country.
Certainly, it was easier for the
media to resort to what was known on the surface rather than digging into
underlying issues by asking the difficult questions of police officials,
associates of deceased or accused, potential witnesses, or even reviewing
Pistorius’s history in terms of macho, violence-prone behaviour.
In the absence of anything
known, the media do what they know best, resort to speculation – oh, and use
the word allegedly as liberally and inappropriately as possible in an effort, seemingly,
to cover their backsides.
That approach helps none of us,
especially when they do it in a ham-handed manner and, crucially, get the
basics wrong like stumbling over words like “murder” and “killing”
The commentariat on all sides of
the domestic violence, violence against women and gun violence debates
contribute little when they expect us to take a side. It might be possible to
be stridently opposed to violence against women and yet be ambivalent about gun
ownership or whether Pistorius murdered Steenkamp, or vice versa.
Especially in a context where we
simply don’t know enough of Pistorius’s macho history because the media has
preferred the “Paralympian as national icon” narrative to anything else. And
where we know so little about the facts in this specific case.
What events like these show
again is that social media can be unreliable in uncovering hard, trustworthy
information. Here was an opportunity for professional journalists to show that
good reporting requires more than just access to a smartphone.
It remains to be seen whether
local media will recover from this lost opportunity. - RAY HARTLE
