The crime of extortion, however, becomes even more worrying when it takes up residence in newsrooms. The primary task of journalists is to report on news events and incidents and provide insights through analysis of these events. Once they become perpetrators of extortion, it’s time for society to be deeply worried.
These factors have the potential to seriously undermine the integrity of the media, leading to significant trust problems between the media and the society that it serves. This is a compromised system that sits somewhere between self-regulation and state regulation. Our system provides no space for government involvement in media regulation and it only provides for the involvement of the public and industry representatives, for instance Press Council of South Africa.
What is important to highlight is that debates around this issue are continuing given the shortcomings presented by the current regulatory regime, which is explicitly voluntary in nature and involves no government representation. The case of the journalists involved in extortion points to a real danger as we traverse a journey of building robust democratic institutions for our future as a nation.
No no no...bad idea.