Every now and then there is a story tucked between Paris Hilton and Jake White which cuts through all the nonsense and leaves one thinking: “This is why we practice journalism. This is why it is important. This is what it is all about.”

Wits Journalism School professor Anton Harber writes on his blog that one such story was the expose in East London’s Daily Dispatch of the appalling conditions in the maternity section of Frere Hospital which appear to have led to an extraordinary number of “stillbirth” deaths.

Deputy Editor Andrew Trench led a team of three reporters – Chandre Prince, Brett Horner and Ntando Makhubu – in a two-month investigation, “walking the maternity wards with hidden cameras, attending the mass burial of dead babies and interviewing medical staff and heartbroken mothers”.

Harber notes that it all started with a single report of a death which got them asking questions; it ended with reporters “staffing the Frere mortuary for an afternoon, answering the phone and dispatching porters to collect bodies”.

They found the place horrifically understaffed, showed that senior management knew of the problem for a long time but did little to address it, and published minutes from meetings in which doctors admitted that patients were dying because of negligence. Two images stand out from their writing: a cleaner delivering a baby in front of shocked students; and mass pauper funerals of babies as much as 18 months after their deaths.

It was good, old-fashioned, leather-pounding-the-floor reporting, done patiently and scrupulously. It required little new technology and no fancy notions of “developmental journalism”, just determination, patience and some investigative skills.

Of course, it also required the assistance of some hospital staff, who they paid tribute to in an editorial, and the support of their relatively new, young editor, Phylicia Oppelt, who must have been stretched to allow a team of reporters to do nothing else for an extended period.

“That was the biggest hurdle in the beginning – three people out of about 16 reporters on one story. Everyone had to take the pain, like news editors who couldn’t do a full news diary for weeks,” Trench said in an interview this week.

The official response was defensive. The provincial health department was given three days to answer 31 questions the reporters put to them in writing, the newspaper reported. The officials asked for more time and were given it. When the second deadline came and went, the department said they were still working on their response. It came in the form of a full-page advert giving long, detailed, technical answers to each question. It was unreadable, hostile in tone, failed to acknowledge any systemic problems, and will provide a text-book case of how not to deal with a public relations crisis.

“There was nothing spectacular and nothing surprising in their response, “ Oppelt told me. “Being in the Eastern Cape, I have no expectations of the response of the provincial authorities. They are contemptuous of us, refuse to answer our questions, ignore our reporters at press conferences and the MEC has told people she does not deal with the Dispatch.”

The Minister of Health’s special adviser, Professor Ronald Green-Thompson, had the national chief director of hospitals at his side when he visited and interviewed staff on Monday. He emerged to pronounce the hospital’s operations “normal”.

As seems to be the case with increasing frequency, the substantive and humane response came from the Deputy Minister of Health, Nzozwe Madlala-Routledge, who left the SACP conference on the weekend and flew down unannounced “to see for herself”. After a two-hour visit, she said the situation in the hospital’s maternity section was “a national crisis”.

“We definitely intend to take up the matter, we are just not sure how to deal with it yet,” her special adviser said.
Oppelt said the lesson for her team was that “we might not work for a national paper, we might be a small, regional paper, but people realize they can make a difference in a very fundamental way, and that makes me very positive.

“I am so proud,” she said.

I am sure that those who say the media always gets it wrong, is staffed by people too junior and inexperienced to do a professional job, is only motivated by the desire to sell papers and make money and does not serve the national interest will now swallow their words. For once, maybe, there will be a letter from the presidency praising journalists for their role in drawing government’s attention where it is needed.

Right?

*This column first appeared in Business Day, 10 July 2007, and was subsequently republished on The Harbringer blog.