Words of warning and sobering reality that must hit home at this eleventh hour

Many of you noticed our shutdown on Monday and to more than 1,000 of you who signed up to become Maverick Insiders, THANK YOU! We extend the same heartfelt thanks to the businesses that contacted us with support.

You join a legion of nearly 30,000 Maverick Insiders who have supported us all these years, and who continue to have our back through thick and thin. We can’t do this without you and we appreciate your support.

To some, it may have seemed over the top to shut Daily Maverick down for a day to convey the depth of the crisis that journalism is facing worldwide.

By all measures, we are doing better than the great majority of the news media worldwide — our audience is growing, as is the quality, depth and spectrum of our work. But make no mistake. Behind the scenes, this is a daily grind for existence — and survival.


https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2024-04-16-thought-daily-mavericks-shutdown-was-a-pr-stunt-this-is-the-real-state-of-the-news-media/

These days, choosing to follow a true media mandate comes with a burden of pain. The financial struggles, the threats, the attacks and the derision are all part of the job. Let me assure you, it is still worth it. 

However, it is a journey that is increasingly impossible to take on one’s own, no matter how successful and/or powerful one may be.

Daily Maverick’s shutdown was not just about saving investigative journalism. It was not only about preserving accurate reporting, analysis, insight and opinions. It was about the importance of maintaining truth and trust in these increasingly anchor-less days. It was about platforms of confidence which thrive on protecting communities and societies. Of the preservation of high standards, of nights not slept, and days spent observing and reporting critically and responsibly about a civilisation that seems to be sinking fast.

Defending truth

More than 10 million of you read our work every month. Every day, you trust us to look beyond the horizon for you. We see a big storm approaching us all.

Defending truth is at the centre of every functioning society. If we can’t distinguish truth from lies and reality from invention, we cannot maintain our value system. Without a value system, we cannot discern right from wrong; our entire edifice will crumble, and not so slowly.

Are we to allow the hijacking of this fundamental point of our very existence, by the lowest, dumbest and most shameless among us? Are we to agree there are indeed “alternative” facts and truths? Are we to surrender what we, as humanity, took thousands of years to achieve, only for it to be obliterated because social media platforms enabled the seeming repossession of what we hold sacred?

At this pace, we will end up surrendering it all. No newsletters, fact-checks and reasoned words could repel the darkness that would descend upon us, should the remaining messengers of truth cease to exist.

If you need to see this darkness in action, just log on to your social media platform of choice and observe the dance of the trolls on what they considered a good day without Daily Maverick. You will find a selection of people, and their multiple aliases, who we exposed through our work, salivating at the possibility of a media-less future.

ACTION: BECOME A MAVERICK INSIDER.

We at Daily Maverick are doing our utmost best for this scenario never to happen. It is often a job shared among a few — media houses and civil society organisations, heroic whistle-blowers, and individuals of great personal courage and convictions.

The odds are stacked against us. The extraordinary pace of change over the past few decades has erased the space for many local and national media brands that for so long provided a lifeblood for so many communities worldwide.

Some of those changes were due to bad business choices made by media executives worldwide — who were blind to the one-in-1,000-years nature of the change brought upon by the internet.

Some of the decisions were made through our collective blindness to the danger of social media — which we allowed to take our audiences and revenues to a Neverland where they are not responsible for anything that is said on their platforms, and yet get to grab all the money on the table.

(As an aside, bringing social media platforms even vaguely to the level of responsibility of the news media would in effect make them unprofitable — being responsible for what we publish is the most expensive aspect of what we do.)

Perhaps the most worrying change turned out to be that some of the world’s nastiest individuals and regimes now have access to the most sophisticated weapons of info-war ever made, at near-zero cost.

My personal invitation is to the people who really should know better to finally wake up … and know better.

News articles do not appear out of thin air. They — people who are often accomplished in their businesses — really should understand that.

Too many people believe that genuine news media brands are “pushing agendas”. 

Check the social media feeds and you will find that Daily Maverick is paid by both the ANC and the DA, that it is both supporting the billionaire class and pushing a “leftist agenda”, that it is both a Hamas and an Israeli propagandist, that it is both pro-Soros and a CIA weapon … the contradictions are endless.

These plainly can’t all be right, but here we are.

It’s unbelievable that I still have to say this, but no serious publication will ever publish articles satisfying every interest group or supporting everyone’s views 100%. 

What matters is keeping the light of truth and reality on.

We, as South Africa and as humanity, are close to switching that light off. What is, to me, the unthinkable part is that we are doing this ourselves.

When that moment happens, please do not say you were not warned.

As journalists warned when Thabo Mbeki was pushing against antiretrovirals, when the police massacred mine workers at Marikana, when Jacob Zuma put South Africa into the Guptas’ hands, when Malema & Co stole money from the poorest of the poor, when Iqbal Survé took billions in dodgy “loans” from the PIC, when Zweli Mkhize got embroiled in the Digital Vibes scandal as health minister during the pandemic, and so, so many other times. 

Our job is to report, investigate, analyse, opine and warn. 

But once all the dust has settled, these are just words. Without action and reaction, they are merely black lines on our screens.

It is people who bring meaning to them. It is YOU who makes these words alive. DM

ACTION: BECOME A MAVERICK INSIDER.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMV39vJQxW8