Can you trust Daily Maverick and Mark Heywood?

South Africa owes a huge debt to Mark Heywood. As co-founder of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) with Zackie Achmat, he forced government to provide treatment for HIV/AIDS sufferers that then president Thabo Mbeki’s denialism had denied them.

Lately, he’s editor of Maverick Citizen, a section of Daily Maverick (DM). DM is largely an opinion site with professional writers and unpaid op-ed contributors (in 2016 they published one of mine). In 2017 it formed investigative unit Scorpio, which in partnership with amaBungani broke the Gupta Leaks emails story. But news and investigative reporting is secondary to its mission. 

Daily Maverick had the potential to be South Africa’s leading news and analysis independent in the style of the Mail & Guardian of a decade and more ago, taking over the mantle from Sunday Times which damaged its reputation through unethical and unprofessional conduct.

After 2017, coincidentally the time it discontinued readers’ comments, it shifted from what to me had been a genuine effort to publish serious, in-depth opinion and analysis to focusing almost exclusively on the ruling ANC's and left-wing's narratives and agendas. I rarely read it now.

South Africa’s media is almost totally left-of-centre in terms of its political position so this is not unusual. Almost all DM’s articles feature some aspect of the politics of ANC, government and left agenda and society as seen from the left. There is an earnest wokeness and political correctness among its contributors and staff who purportedly are social justice advocates and never stop telling one so.

While some are sincere, they come across as dilettante first year sociology majors testing new ideas while not having the real world experience of their subjects – the country’s poor and disadvantaged on whose behalf they’re allegedly champions.

Of course, this is indicative of most South Africa’s media and journalism.

And then there’s the quality of DM’s journalism. A number of times I’ve seen instances of poor writing and editing and absence of fact-checking and research. I told managing editor Janet Heard, and once that they need good editors. She replied they had. It wasn't in evidence then, though.

And then there's the lack of comments and letters from readers. For the second time, in late 2017 DM ended comments. Editor Branko Brkic said it had become like a cesspool. He had a point. Invariably, comments, mostly from far-right bigots, were abusive, racist and offensive as they usually are on most sites.

He claimed it was targeted at their writers but that wasn’t true. It was an excuse to deflect from their lack of comments moderation, intolerance of criticism of editorial and for anything that wasn’t politically correct. Other media in SA too are the same but maintain comments (News24 ceased theirs for the same reason) or remove comments and ban commentators (two sites banned me).

DM used the Civil Comments platform that required community moderation. Brkic said it wasn’t working but that wasn’t true because even innocuous comments were removed and readers suspended. Based on something he said, I suspect the reason was commercial/contractual. Perhaps the licence fee was too high.

In any event, he said comments would return once they found a new platform. It returned over a year later but only for subscribers. DM grandiosely and hubristically says only its readers have the “intelligence and experience to comment”. What nonsense! The articles rarely attract comments and when they’re do, they’re standard: Twitter length, often cryptic, declarative statements without basis and banal. They represent DM’s and SA media’s average readers.

Brkic and DM’s website said they accept letters to the editor and contributions. Until late 2019 I sent about ten including emails where I pointed out mistakes in articles. To a couple of these Heard said I must submit them as op-eds which they would “consider” for publication, i.e. there was a strong chance they would. They didn’t but I doubted they would because I was critical of DM and SA’s poor media and often said so. They can issue criticism but can’t take it.

The last time was in November in response to Mark Heywood’s interview of Dr Beth Engelbrecht, head of Western Cape Health Department, about their “clean” (unqualified) audit for the 2019/18 financial year.

Heywood uncritically accepted Engelbrecht’s self-congratulatory account of “managing a burning platform”. He did no independent checking and research because he said he didn’t have information to contradict her.

It was an astounding, untrue statement and a reflection of his and DM’s poor journalism. Information about problems with WCHD’s service is available on the internet as reports, surveys and media stories. His former organisation’s (TAC) 2018 State of WC Health report stated it was “failing the people it serves”. The annual South African Health Survey’s 2018 report ranked WCHD 48%, down from 53%. Media stories regularly relate patients’ poor experience.

Heywood was lazy and unprofessional. My letter in article form (see here) noted his and DM’s poor journalism in passing. Naturally, Heard didn’t publish it.

Later I copied her, not for publication, a report about my experience of WCHD’s service and a high-level assessment of its financial report. I wrote Engelbrecht had lied to the public and WC legislature about their funding which she claimed had declined for four consecutive years. It hadn't. The department's annual reports show it had increased almost twice inflation annually.

If Heywood had done a cursory examination of their annual reports and available information, which he said didn’t exist, he would’ve seen what I did and questioned her, or at least withheld his opinion there was no information to contradict her. (Unknown to either of us at the time, AfriForum laid criminal charges against Engelbrecht in November relating to irregular expenditure. curiously, she was replaced from April 1 amidst a pandemic. She served six years only.)

DM (and media) was slavishly obsequious to Helen Zille when she was Western Cape premier and an “opinionista” – she was untouchable. But after 2019’s election and her premiership ended and she stopped writing for them it was open season on her.

Today Heywood, media, public and even supposedly well-informed people like analysts still have the mistaken belief the Western Cape government is excellent and are given the benefit of the doubt.

Heywood’s other articles are imbued with the social activism he once was. Like professional and armchair sociologists, he’s unrealistic about politico-economic affairs. To them, decisions that impact their client groups or issues they’re championing are simple, reductive and for-or-against binary. If a decision goes against them, it’s wrong, unprincipled or evil when often it’s they who don’t understand reality. Only when they get their way is it morally correct.

While I respect his passion – I’m an activist in my personal capacity and understand him to an extent – as the journalist he’s now, it’s less relevant and must be tempered with reason and objectivity. As 1 Corinthians says, when I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

Heywood hasn’t left activism behind. That’s why he still writes as if he is one and why I’m unconvinced of his new role as professional journalist and editor. And he shares his media colleagues' casual regard for journalistic practices.

But given Daily Maverick positioning itself as the country’s premier left-wing publishing activism site, he’s in the right company.