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Zapiro
Born in Cape Town in 1958, Zapiro couldn’t imagine a career in cartooning, so he studied architecture at University of Cape Town.
Couldn’t imagine a career in architecture, so…>
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Citizen Journalism
THE CITIZEN NEWSPAPER has fired a staff photographer for tweeting his disgust at the paper's decision to digitally remove dead bodies from a news photograph. The photo, published on the paper's front page, depicted the scene of the suicide bombing in Afghanistan which took eight South African lives. Ironically, the paper cited "bringing the newspaper into disrepute" amongst its charges against Johann Hattingh.
On the right the original AFP image (with two dead bodies) is shown with the sanitised one.
RIGHT OF REPLY: Martin Williams, editor of The Citizen who features in the above cartoon, has responded to it in the following opinion piece, first published in The Citizen on October 3, 2012.
by MARTIN WILLIAMS, Editor 'The Citizen'.
I should be flattered to have featured in yesterday’s Zapiro cartoon, even if it is based on lies.
The cartoon has two panels headed: “The Citizen doctored a photo” and “then fired the whisteblower”.
Never mind the widely disseminated Facebook entry where the dismissed staff member says that he is not the whistleblower.
*
It gives me another chance to try to clear the air.
We do not approve of the doctoring of images. No one was dismissed for whistleblowing or for complaining about the way the photograph came out in the paper. The way it was published was wrong. I have apologised and taken steps to ensure there is no repetition.
I welcome healthy debate, especially about media ethics. What we cannot tolerate are defamatory lies about our staff. Probably the most offensive tweet is reproduced below.
It contains at least two lies.
First, the pics ed did not complain at all during the meeting where the use of the photo was discussed, nor to me the day the cloned photo was published. Hattingh was not at the meeting. I was.
Second, he says senior editorial staff were “ok with it”. That’s false. No one expressed any satisfaction that the cloned photo was used. In fact we were all distressed and wondering how we could put things right. Hattingh’s malicious falsehoods worked in exactly the opposite direction.
By saying the photo usage was unethical, he is also saying senior editorial staff lack integrity. That is false and defamatory. If his criticism had been fairly based on facts, rather than false assumptions, the outcome may have been different.
I tried to make such points in answering a critical blog by Anton Harber where he expresses admiration for Hattingh and says we committed a cardinal sin.
So we have a milieu where it is a cardinal sin to clone a photograph, even in error, while to spread defamatory lies about your colleagues is “admirable”.
Draw your own conclusions. Draw your own cartoons. WTF.
*[DISCLOSURE: This post has been edited by the inclusion of the graphic depicting Hattingh's facebook post (referred to in the sentence that precedes it). It was inadvertently omitted when we first published this response.]
