Following President Cyril Ramaphosaâs theatrical meeting with Donald Trump on Wednesday last week, there has been an absolute outpouring of âfact-checkingâ. It's been a tidal wave: interviews, opinion pieces, statements: people who have never been close to South Africa are fact-checking the âfactsâ. The past week has been nuts. Everyone has something to say. I had something to say!
Here is a good example.
But perversely, after wading through small mountains of commentary, I think all the piles of analysis posing as fact-checking have reduced the total quantum of truth rather than enhanced it. And in so doing have inadvertently underlined media bias. How is that possible?
As a journalist, a theoretical purveyor of âThe Truthâ, this is unsettling and disturbing. We always knew the MAGA right wing was prone to dissembling. You hardly even need to make the case. But the knee-jerk, paper-thin, high-pitched reaction of the left wing is now co-opting the same methodology, falling into the same traps, and creating the same distortions. Honestly, it's distressing.
Fact-checking now is becoming just another way of arguing your point of view rather than ensuring dispassionate objectivity and, well, some truth. It has to do with the underlying motivation: if the fact-checking intends to substitute your point of view for the point of view of the person being fact-checked, well, isnât that just expressing your point of view? Do we know how fact-checking should work? Or to put it another way, who fact-checks the fact-checkers?
It's like that old joke about infinite regress reputedly told by American theoretical physicist Richard Phillips Feynman. He once told the story of giving a lecture in which he suggested, controversially, that the Earth was round. An old lady in the audience cited the old Hindu myth that the earth was flat and rested, as everybody knows, on the back of a turtle. Somewhat smugly, Feynman asked what the turtle was resting on, and she answered another, bigger turtle. He then asked what the bigger turtle was resting on, and she answered, "Sonny, from then on, it's turtles all the way down."
If we are in the position that we have to fact-check the fact-checkers, it's surely just turtles all the way down. How do you get out of this cycle? What follows is a suggestion based on some reflections on the avalanche that happened this past week.
The whole truth or donât call it âfact-checkingâ
When I was a law student at Wits years ago, one of my lecturers (sorry, I forget who it was) gave students some advice about answering questions in the exams. She said students should wrestle with the topic to the ground. You should fight it the same way as wrestlers try to grasp their opponents, with difficulty and effort, making your way progressively through sweat and toil, toward an outcome. In so doing, you will have necessarily assessed what the 'other side' will argue and evaluate whether you are not persuaded by those arguments, reaching a new level of rational understanding.
What a great analogy! The same applies to fact-checking. The simple answer is very seldom the answer, it's the start of the answer. This is why witnesses take the oath before getting into the witness box that hey will not only tell the truth, but the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is all so manifest, that it's hard to know why it's so poorly applied in practice.
Here is an example from the Oval Office hoedown. We all know that there is no âgenocideâ of white farmers in South Africa. Genocide implies a systematic, intentional effort to destroy a racial or ethnic group; no credible evidence supports this.
By the way, since we're being truthful, he didnât actually make such a claim in the meeting. What he said was, "A lot of people are very concerned with regard to South Africa⊠we have many people that feel they're being persecuted, and they are coming to the US, so we take from many locations if we feel there's persecution or genocide going on." But he has used the word âwhite genocideâ before.
So, Trumpâs interpretation is fiction in the broad sense. He is transparently extrapolating, you would guess, as a sop to his predominantly white support base. Shocker. First time in history a politician has done that. This is perhaps the easiest part of Trump's victim fantasy to negate, and it has been negated. Repeatedly. Ad nauseum.
But did the negaters wrestle with the issue? Not so much.
There are so many examples here, but just take this one because it's a reflection of the attitude of someone in government rather than someone involved in the âfake newsâ wars. This is Police Minister Senzo Mchunu.
What he said was that SA respected Trump, but didn't credit the "white genocide" story. And he had facts. Actual facts. In the first three months of this year, six rural community attacks (reflected in the crime statistics under the category âmurder of farming communityâ) took place. That figure was constituted by two farm owners, two farm employees, a farm manager and a farm dweller. Given the circumstances of the international focus, Mchunu broke the notional rules of the police statistics and revealed, wait for it, only one of the farm dwellers was white. OMG! Revelation.
His âanalysisâ was then promptly displayed triumphantly all over SAâs media. I mean, really everywhere. âFive of six farm murder victims were blackâ â Police Minister Senzo Mchunu rubbishes Trumpâs white genocide lies", was the headline of the Daily Maverick story.
Caryn Dolley
But was that reaction a real attempt to deal with truth by a representative of the State? And if not, doesnât that render the idea that Trump is âdistorting the truthâ a little fallow?
For a start, what Mchunu certainly did not do was âwrestle with the issue". If he had, he would have mentioned, in passing perhaps, that this statistic was wildly out of the ordinary. The SAPS' figures suggest that 65 people were murdered in the âagricultural land/farm/plot/small holdingâ category in the last quarter of 2024.
Compared to the people who live on farms or quasi-farms in SA, that is a thumping number; but nothing like the 1,589 killed in shebeens, or the 2,990 people killed in the homes of the perpetrator, of course.
The numbers he provided are interesting for a different reason, too. Mchunu cited the farm murders for the first quarter of this year, but actually, he was presenting the stats for the last quarter of last year. So, isnât this cherry-picking, the exact thing he and so many others have claimed Trump was doing?!
And then Mchunu relayed a total porky pie. He said: âThe history of farm murders in the country has always been distorted and reported in an unbalanced way; the truth is that farm murders have always included African people in more numbers,â he said. Presumably, he meant in greater numbers.
But the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU) has carefully kept numbers of people killed in farm attacks, and they dutifully include farm workers (which was particularly useful after the SAPS stopped separating out farm attacks in its data from 2008 - they returned in 2013). In 30 years of keeping this database, the number of farm workers murdered in farm attacks has never exceeded the number of farmers murdered.
Of course, it depends on what you mean by âfarm attackâ; we donât agree on what constitutes a farm attack because the SAPS have the bizarre classification âagricultural land/farm/plot/small holdingâ - that spans a lot of stuff. The number of murders in this category is typically around four times the number that the TAU records, so at a rough guess, if you include murders in the peri-urban areas as âfarm murdersâ, it's possible Mchunu is correct in terms of his departmentâs weird classification. But are those really farm murders in the true sense?
The odd thing here is that Mchunu told porkies even though it would have assisted his argument to tell the whole truth! The TAU's figures show that the number of farm attacks is actually declining; in the 2010-2020 decade, around 40 farmers a year were being murdered. So far this decade (excluding 2025 which is incomplete) that's down by half, (presumably distorted a bit by Covid). Goes to show that if you hide the bad, you also inadvertently hide the good.
The other issue debated intensely over the years is whether the attacks on farm owners are proportionately greater than âordinaryâ murders. I have seen dozens of claims that they are not, though this is complex since both the denominator and the divisor are variable numbers.
But personally, I would be shocked if farm attacks were not proportionately greater. Given characteristically oldish people living in remote areas far from help who are distinctly richer than most of the people around them, wouldnât it be nuts if they werenât disproportionately attacked?
I wonât bore you with the details, but the same conceptual falsities are present in much of the rest of the âfact-checkingâ that went on after the Ramaphosa / Trump meeting on a host of other issues: the white crosses, the âkill the boerâ video, the Land Expropriation Act context, and even the article about the Congo. All of it. Trump made outrageous false claims. In "fact-checking" these distorted claims, these claims were further distorted. And that raises an odd question: Trumpâs motivations are pretty obvious. But why, in seeking to refute a false claim, would you fail to tell the whole truth? Why the screeching defensiveness? Why the preening righteousness?
My guess is that underlying what is going on here is a kind of national embarrassment. In the same way we try to hide our blemishes, not telling the whole truth is the way we live with our intolerable and inconceivable faults.
Understandable ... but weak, imho. How do you combat a problem if you can't even bear to think about it? đ„
From the department of interesting, but seriously? ...
Bob Berwyn
From the department of buckle in bitches ...
From the department of I'm in favour, I think...
Michael Easter
Thanks for reading - please do share if you have a friend (or enemy!) you think would value this blog and ask them to add their email in the block below - it's free for the time being. If the sign-up link doesn't appear, you'll find it on the site.
Till next time. đ„
Tim Cohen
Join the conversation