Anton Harber is a respected former editor of the Weekly Mail, a veteran of 40 years of journalism, now Caxton Adjunct Professor of Journalism at Wits University.

Anton Harber’s book is about the rot in South African journalism. He is part of it! And sort of self-flaggelating but not much. His high-minded panels of journalist judges dished out several awards over several years to honour "investigative journalists" whose stories have (years later) been shown to be total lies, planted by the state capturists, organised crime and ANC factions. Like Chippy Olver's book on PE “How to steal a city”, it is often engagingly written, but the whistle-blowing author is blowing the whistle on himself. I am unconvinced that this path of penance allows redemption. Harber conveys the astonishing scale, breadth, depth and long duration of journalistic malfeasance, but he minimises it, with a comparison to Jayson Blair (one reporter, at one newspaper, who faked his stories over one year, before he got caught).

Harber explains the decline in press standards partly by referring to the commercial pressures placed on editors and newsrooms by desperate media owners. He contrasts the “bad” journalists with the very, very good journalists in amaBhungane. He shows how it was brave (and often difficult) journalism that toppled the corrupt Jacob Zuma from the Presidency. This was through the devastating press stories derived from a trove of digitally-preserved emails known as the GuptaLeaks. But this is a retold story. Like the story of Joseph, it bears re-telling and Harber re-tells it with pace and tension. I first read the story of the GuptaLeaks background in “We have a Game Changer”, the wonderful, self-congratulatory, beautifully designed book issued in 2019 by the Daily Maverick. All this path-breaking original source gets from Harber is a meagre footnote to confirm to readers the identity of “Lady Macbeth”, an evil, dishonourable self-obsessed business leader.

Even though I sort of knew about the stories and scandals in the book, and where it all would end, I was often confused by the time lines presented by Harber – jumping forward, leaping back, reporting evidence from April before that of January, crudely creating narrative surprises by suppressing information known in one chapter, so there could be a shocking reveal in another. Acceptable for a thriller writer, not for a journalist posing as an historian. You never get to find out where Anton was when he found out that his panel of judges had awarded coveted Taco Kuiper prizes for investigative journalism to cheats, liars and bought journalists who had accepted planted stories. Maybe this is because it happened more than once.

Difficult book to write, perhaps. Also hard to follow. And the references, of which there are many and which the author found a real chore to insert, don’t always tell you enough to locate a source. Maybe the Wits Journalism School could host a source archive, like that set up by Padraig O’Malley at the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Because these skeletons deserve a closet. ( )