On those rare occasions when a reputable news organisation makes a mistake, the vultures that feed off the rotting corpse of truth descend in caterwauling glee. “Look!” they cry. “You can’t trust mainstream media, but you can trust me! Buy my merch now!” The fact that they are almost exclusively sad little intellectual squibs regurgitating conspiracy theories and idiot takes for profit doesn’t seem to faze them at all.
A case in point is the recent furore about News24’s mistakes in its coverage of the now-disgraced former head of the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption (Idac), Andrea Johnson. Specifically, News24 editor-in-chief Adriaan Basson and investigations assistant editor Pieter du Toit were, to paraphrase their own words, too deferential to Johnson, too uncritical in their defence of her, and basically just seduced by her personality. News24 characterised this as an indefensible lapse in journalistic rigour.
Basson apologised, acknowledging: “We should have done better.” Du Toit also apologised, writing that “at its core, journalism is about the search for truth and about holding power in all its forms accountable. The only way to do that is to practise the craft honestly and fairly … it is the only way to gain trust and to maintain credibility.”
News24 has been South Africa’s most trusted news brand for the past eight years, according to the Reuters Digital News Report. In some years, it has shared that position with another organisation. In 2026, for instance, it shared the spot with eNCA. Both newsrooms scored 80%. This is an extremely high score. But the trust score doesn’t tell the whole story. Of the people surveyed, 11% neither trust nor distrust News24, and 9% actively don’t trust News24.
These statistics seem to me to show an ideal state for news in South Africa. You want people to have news brands they can trust, because that way information powers a healthy democracy. People need to know that the information they are given is evidence-based and can be trusted. At the same time, there should also be enough people who don’t trust a brand, because that keeps the news ecosystem healthy.
In the US, where the news environment has been fatally wounded by disinformation and active attacks on the integrity of information, The New York Times is trusted by 43% of people surveyed, and distrusted by 32%. Fox News is trusted by 33% and distrusted by 48%. This is a dangerously polarised environment, and one that is hugely susceptible to manipulation. It rewards those who produce clickbait, and who profit from sowing confusion and anger.
Earned trust
There are many people in South Africa who would love us to go the same way as the US. Those people have jumped in to attack News24, because it profits them to persuade people that news organisations can’t be trusted. A specific example is how the shills at AfriForum have leapt to attack News24 about its Idac errors, because they would much prefer to avoid the searchlight investigative journalism has put on their affairs.
And yet, one of the reasons you can trust a brand like News24 is that it doesn’t pretend it always gets it right. And when it does make a mistake, it documents that mistake and apologises. This is a core tenet of ethical, trustworthy journalism. And this is one of the ways you can judge whether a news organisation has earned your (qualified, always qualified) trust.
I hold no brief for the mainstream news orgs such as News24, but what I am vehemently opposed to are the bottom feeders in the information stream. These are people trying to convince you that you are not clever enough to read the news and make your own judgment. They want you to believe that you are a counter in a zero-sum game, and that you either trust journalism or you don’t. For them, journalism is not a craft. It’s a belief system. But in reality, journalism is a product. At its best, it is governed by professional standards and codes, and is quality-controlled by a robustly managed production line. At its worst, it is a cravenly deployed marketing arm for bad actors, entirely without integrity.
In South Africa, despite the presence of a few unethical news organisations running stories about 10 imaginary babies and others who push foreign state propaganda, we still have a number of ethical, trustworthy newsrooms of varying sizes. And that includes the new breed of news creators.
Does trustworthy mean blind trust? No. Clearly, a brand such as News24 will have its blind spots and unconscious biases. And even its conscious biases, which the discerning reader will be able to clearly see threaded through the journalism. This is no reason, though, to allow the noisy agents of disinformation to stop you from reaping the benefits of news organisations doing their best to adhere to a transparent editorial code of ethics.
Disclosure: Chris Roper was editor-in-chief of 24.com from 2007–2009, and is a contributing author on the Reuters Digital News Report
