THE FOUNDATIONAL PRINCIPLE
In a democratic society, the protection of journalists must be understood not as a matter of courtesy but as a fundamental requirement. It serves as a structural necessity, one upon which the integrity of democratic institutions ultimately rests.
To consider this more closely, a democracy derives its legitimacy from an informed and engaged citizenry. For citizens to participate meaningfully in public life, to deliberate, and to hold power to account, they must have access to accurate and independently gathered information. The press fulfills this function. It investigates, verifies, and brings to light matters that would otherwise remain concealed from public view.
It follows then that any erosion of journalist safety constitutes a direct erosion of the conditions that make democracy possible. When journalists are subjected to threat, intimidation, or restriction, the mechanisms of accountability are weakened because those in authority face diminished scrutiny. The principle of transparency is compromised because the public’s access to facts about governance, public resources, and social affairs is narrowed. And the practice of self-governance is undermined because decisions made by citizens without reliable information cannot fully reflect the will of an informed electorate.
From this perspective, to claim the status of a democracy while permitting an environment in which the press is insecure presents a fundamental contradiction. The security and freedom of journalists are therefore not peripheral to democratic life. They are central to its structure and to its continued viability.
Access to Information
In South Africa this principle is tested in material ways. Our Constitution in sections 16 and 28 protects freedom of expression and freedom of the press. The Public Access to Information Act (PAIA) affirms that right.
Journalists Facing Threats
Yet between constitutional promise and lived practice there remains a gap. Journalists covering political violence, corruption, and the proceedings of commissions such as the Madlanga Commission have faced threats, intimidation, and in some cases violence.
As SANEF Chairperson Sbu Ngalwa said in January: “We are losing reporters not to retirement, but to fear.”
At the same time, the economic base of independent journalism has eroded sharply since 2018, with newsroom closures and retrenchments reducing the capacity for sustained investigation, particularly at community and local level. When these outlets weaken, the first spaces of accountability in towns and districts disappear. To affirm democracy in South Africa without confronting the insecurity of journalists is therefore to affirm it in theory while undermining it in practice.
THE TEST IN 2026
In South Africa this is not theoretical.
In 2025 alone, South African National Editors Forum SANEF recorded 23 incidents of threats and attacks against journalists, from KwaZulu-Natal KZN municipal reporters covering tender fraud to freelancers covering the Madlanga Commission. Since 2018, over 40 community newsrooms have closed. In Durban last March, a journalist investigating police collusion had to relocate after his home was petrol-bombed. When we speak of protecting journalists, we are speaking of protecting people who can no longer do their work and return home safely.
WHY THIS PROTECTION IS NOT NEGOTIABLE
We are compelled to consider the essential function that journalism performs, and why it warrants such an uncompromising defence.
Journalism operates as the instrument through which the public exercises scrutiny over institutions of power. It undertakes the investigation of abuses of authority, examines the allocation and expenditure of public resources, and records violations of rights that might otherwise be obscured or suppressed.
If we remove this function from public life, we must then ask what alternative mechanism exists to reveal corruption and to bring misconduct to light. Further, we must consider how citizens are to obtain information that is verified and reliable, information upon which sovereign decisions and democratic participation depend.
The acceptance of a condition in which journalists may be intimidated, subjected to litigation intended to silence them, physically attacked, or deprived of economic viability, is tantamount to the acceptance of a democracy that functions without light. It is the acceptance of a system in which power is exercised beyond the reach of public knowledge and public accountability.
THE DIMENSIONS OF PROTECTION REQUIRED
Protection in this context cannot be treated as superficial. It must extend comprehensively across legal, physical, digital, economic, and cultural domains.
Legally
From a legal standpoint, we must examine whether constitutions and statutes provide adequate and explicit guarantees of freedom of expression and freedom of the press. We must also consider whether protections for journalistic sources are treated as absolute rather than conditional, and whether legislation exists to guard against the misuse of legal processes to silence inquiry, such as through strategic lawsuits designed to burden and intimidate.
Physically
Physically, the question arises as to whether threats directed at journalists are met with the same immediacy and seriousness as threats directed at public officials. Equally important is whether there exists both state and institutional commitment to investigate such threats and to prosecute those responsible without exception or deference.
The Digital Domain
In the digital domain, the challenges are compounded by surveillance, the exposure of personal information, and coordinated campaigns of online harassment.
Here we must ask what safeguards are in place to protect a journalist’s data, to secure confidential sources, and to address the impact on mental well-being.
Gendered Attacks
Women journalists bear the brunt of this digital violence.
Research by Media Monitoring Africa shows 73% of online harassment targeting SA journalists in 2025 was directed at women, including doxxing, rape threats, and deepfake pornography used to discredit their reporting. This is not just an attack on individuals. It is a deliberate strategy to drive women out of public interest reporting on politics, crime, and corruption.
SLAPPs
South African journalism is operating in an environment where the threat of litigation is increasingly being used not to vindicate legitimate reputational harm, but to discourage public scrutiny altogether. Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, commonly referred to as SLAPPs, have emerged as a mechanism through which powerful individuals, corporations, and public office bearers seek to exhaust journalists and media institutions through protracted and costly legal processes.
The objective of these actions is rarely to succeed on substantive legal grounds. Rather, it is to create a climate of risk and uncertainty that compels editors and reporters to reconsider whether a story is worth pursuing. This dynamic reveals a fundamental weakness in the South African legal and institutional framework. While the Constitution affords robust protection to freedom of expression and the media, the practical architecture for defending those rights against abusive litigation remains underdeveloped.
A central deficiency lies in the absence of dedicated legislative instruments designed to identify and dismiss meritless claims at an early stage. In South Africa, a defamation or interdict matter must ordinarily proceed through the full course of litigation, irrespective of its underlying intent. This requires journalists, editors, and often individual freelancers to incur significant legal costs and to devote years to defending work that was undertaken in the public interest. The financial burden alone is sufficient to produce a chilling effect, particularly within smaller independent newsrooms that lack the reserves to sustain prolonged court battles. Compounding this is the fact that cost orders, when granted, seldom operate as a deterrent. Courts have yet to develop a consistent practice of penalising litigants who bring claims that are manifestly disproportionate to any reputational injury alleged. As a result, the legal system, intended to arbitrate disputes fairly, is instead being instrumentalised to suppress accountability reporting on matters of corruption, governance, and corporate conduct.
International Experience
International experience demonstrates that this problem is not unique to South Africa, and that several jurisdictions have responded with targeted reforms.
In the United States and in a number of Canadian provinces, anti-SLAPP statutes have been enacted to address precisely this abuse. These laws provide for a special motion through which a defendant can seek early dismissal of a claim that arises from speech on a matter of public concern. Once such a motion is filed, the onus shifts to the plaintiff to demonstrate that the claim has genuine merit and is not an attempt to silence legitimate debate. Where the motion succeeds, the matter is struck out expeditiously and the plaintiff is typically ordered to pay the defendant’s legal costs. This approach preserves the right to litigate genuine grievances while filtering out actions whose primary purpose is intimidation.
A similar logic can be observed in parts of the United Kingdom and Ireland, where reforms to defamation law have raised procedural thresholds and expanded the court’s power to make punitive costs awards in cases that are deemed to be without reasonable prospect of success.
Beyond legislative reform, other countries have strengthened the ecosystem around journalism to reduce vulnerability. In several democracies, co-ordinated legal defence funds have been established to ensure that journalists are not left to face litigation alone. These funds, often supported by media organisations, civil society, and the legal profession on a pro bono basis, provide both representation and financial relief. The effect is to distribute risk and to signal that an attack on one journalist is treated as an attack on the institution of the press.
Judicial practice has also evolved in some jurisdictions, with senior courts issuing guidance to manage cases that implicate public interest speech. This includes tighter case management, limits on discovery, and an expectation that judges will be alert to the broader implications of allowing a claim to proceed.
In some parts of Europe, additional transparency requirements have been introduced, obliging litigants in media-related matters to disclose the source of funding for their claims, thereby exposing third-party financing that is frequently associated with SLAPP activity.
Africa is not waiting. In 2023, Kenya’s Media Legal Defence Fund pooled resources from 12 newsrooms to fight 18 SLAPP cases. In Ghana, courts have begun dismissing defamation claims against public interest reporting at an early stage. South Africa, with the strongest Constitution on the continent, should be leading, not catching up.
South Africa Deserves Immediate Intervention
For South Africa, the path forward requires a combination of legal, institutional, and cultural interventions. The introduction of an anti-SLAPP mechanism would provide courts with a tool to dispose of abusive litigation quickly and to shift the financial consequences back to the party initiating it. Such a provision could be enacted either as a standalone statute or as an amendment to existing court rules and practice directives. Alongside this, the consolidation of existing media support initiatives into a formalised defence fund would ensure that journalists have access to legal expertise regardless of the size of their outlet. Judicial education would also be critical, to equip the bench with the ability to recognise the characteristics of strategic litigation and to manage such matters in a manner that minimises delay and cost.
Finally, newsrooms themselves have a role to play in refusing to treat these lawsuits as private matters. By reporting on the attempt to silence as part of the public record, the media can reduce the efficacy of the strategy and reaffirm the principle that public interest journalism is not to be deterred by the threat of legal reprisal.
In sum, South Africa’s constitutional commitment to a free press is not in question. What is required now is to align procedural and institutional practice with that commitment. By drawing on precedents from other democracies that have confronted similar challenges, South Africa can develop a framework that protects both reputation and expression, and that ensures the courts remain a forum for justice rather than an instrument for suppression.
Dealing With Surveillance of Journalists
They face coordinated online harassment, doxxing, and the use of deepfakes to discredit work and endanger sources, with women journalists disproportionately affected. There is also growing concern about surveillance, including spyware and SIM-swap fraud aimed at identifying confidential sources. These threats cannot be treated as private problems for individual journalists. They require the state to investigate digital attacks with the same urgency as physical ones, and they require technology platforms to accept responsibility for amplification and for the protection of user data in the public interest.
Economically
Economically, the viability of independent media must be assessed. Can news organizations operate without yielding to political or corporate pressure? Are mechanisms in place to defend editorial independence from financial coercion and to ensure that economic power is not used to dictate coverage?
We need three things now.
First, amend the Independent Communication Authority of South Africa ICASA regulations to force tech platforms to share ad revenue with news producers. Second, expand the Media Development and Diversity Agency MDDA to ring-fence funding for local watchdog journalism, with editorial independence protected by law. Third, introduce a tax credit for citizens and companies who subscribe to independent media. Press freedom cannot survive on goodwill alone. It must be resourced.
Culturally
Finally, on a cultural level, we must explore public understanding of the role of a critical press. Is it recognised not as an adversary of the state, but as an essential mechanism of accountability? Do we as a society reject the characterisation of journalism as hostile or illegitimate merely because its findings are uncomfortable or inconvenient?
THE COST OF SILENCE IS IMPUNITY
When journalists are silenced, the primary beneficiary is not the public. It is those who depend on secrecy to avoid scrutiny.
In South Africa we have seen how attacks on the press coincide with the weakening of accountability in policing, procurement, and the prosecution of serious crime. A commission of inquiry, however well constituted, cannot substitute for a free press.
Commissions do at many instances rely on journalists to investigate, to protect witnesses through public attention, and to ensure that findings do not end as reports without implementation. To tolerate intimidation of the press is therefore to tolerate the conditions in which corruption and violence can continue unexamined. The protection of journalists is thus inseparable from the fight against impunity.
LET US NOT MINCE OUR WORDS
We must state this plainly. Any effort to undermine a journalist, whether through acts of violence, the initiation of litigation intended to silence, campaigns of defamation, or forms of economic retaliation, constitutes a direct assault upon the public’s right to access information.
In examining this, we find that no justification can be sustained for such actions. There are no exceptional circumstances that legitimately warrant the suppression of reporting undertaken in the public interest. To argue otherwise is to misunderstand the relationship between an informed citizenry and democratic governance.
When such attacks are tolerated, even in limited instances, the effect is not neutral. It is the incremental cession of ground to authoritarian practice. Each instance in which intimidation succeeds narrows the space in which scrutiny can occur, and in doing so, it diminishes the capacity of democratic institutions to remain accountable to those they serve.
BUT WHAT ABOUT BAD JOURNALISM?
Let us address this directly. Yes, journalism can be poor, inaccurate, or biased.
The answer is not violence or SLAPPs. The answer is more journalism. It is corrections, right of reply, and the Press Ombudsman. In a democracy we do not burn down the library because one book is wrong. We publish another book. Conflating criticism of the press with criminalising the press is the oldest tactic of authoritarianism.
THE PROTECTIVE MANDATE
Therefore, the responsibility rests collectively with the state, with institutions, with media organisations, and with citizens.
Legal Obligation
The state and relevant institutions bear the obligation to enforce existing legal protections and to identify and close any gaps that leave journalists vulnerable to harm. There must also be a consistent commitment to investigate and prosecute every threat and every act of aggression without delay and without deference to status or influence.
Professional Standards
Media organisations, for their part, carry the duty to uphold professional standards while defending the independence of their work. Press freedom does not mean press impunity.
The remedy for poor, inaccurate, or harmful journalism is not violence, censorship, or litigation intended to silence. It is more journalism, the right of reply, corrections, and the processes of the Press Council and the courts.
Protecting Democracy
A democracy must be robust enough to tolerate criticism and robust enough to demand standards. Conflating the two weakens both accountability and freedom.
Citizens, meanwhile, have a role in sustaining a democratic culture. This requires a public that is educated on the function of journalism within a free society, and that actively rejects disinformation and mischaracterizations of the press. It further requires tangible support for independent media, both financial and moral, so that it is not left to operate in isolation.
Only through the coordinated action of these actors can protection move from principle to practice. The state must resource dedicated SAPS capacity to investigate threats against journalists, and courts must treat SLAPPs as an abuse of process. Legislation protecting sources must be treated as near-absolute, not conditional.
Media organisations must invest in digital security, safety protocols, insurance, and legal defence, while refusing to trade editorial independence for financial survival.
Citizens must do more than affirm press freedom in principle. They must subscribe to and support independent media, reject disinformation about the press, and insist that leaders answer questions rather than attack those who ask them.
Technology platforms must be held accountable for removing coordinated harassment and for safeguarding the data of journalists and sources.
DON’T UNNECESSARILY AVOID ENGAGEMENT AND THEN CRY FOUL
What I have observed is a prevailing sense of apprehension, and as a consequence, a tendency among many to avoid engagement when approached by journalists.
You Can’t Remove Journalism From Its Function
What is often overlooked in this avoidance is the nature of the journalistic function itself. The fundamental reason journalists ask questions lies in the purpose of journalism itself.
Journalism functions as a mechanism of inquiry, and through that inquiry it seeks to inform the public, to hold institutions of power to account, and to bring into the public record experiences and evidence that might otherwise remain unseen. An informed citizenry cannot make sovereign decisions without access to verified information, and scrutiny of authority cannot occur without persistent questioning.
As Andrew Vachss observed, “Journalism is what maintains democracy. It is the force for progressive social change.”
The Duty of Inquiry
When direct responses are withheld, the duty of inquiry does not cease.
Journalists are trained to be inquisitive and may pursue evidence through alternative means, to examine documents, to consult multiple sources, and to reach conclusions through deductive reasoning. That is why a subject’s silence does not prevent a story from being told. It only determines the materials from which that story will be constructed. This is reflected in I.F. Stone’s description of the journalist as “the lookout on the bridge of the ship of state,” a role that requires continued observation even in the absence of co-operation.
A Choice With Consequences
It follows that responsibility for those conclusions cannot reasonably be placed upon the journalist alone. Where adequate opportunity for comment or clarification has been provided and declined, silence becomes a choice with consequences. In the absence of a direct account, the public record will still be constructed, and it will be constructed from the material that is accessible.
The Journalist Narrates the Consequence
This understanding has long been articulated by those within and outside the profession. The press has been called “the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man,” as Thomas Jefferson put it, and the United States Supreme Court affirmed in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan that “the press was to serve the governed, not the governors.” Walter Cronkite reduced the task to its essence when he said, “The job of journalism is to get the story and to tell the story.” Judith Miller similarly noted that “A good journalist is a person who listens to everyone, but in the end, walks away with the truth.”
Others have spoken to the necessity of questioning authority directly. I.F. Stone argued that “The duty of a journalist is to state the facts as he sees them. To question all authority.” And in a more pointed formulation, William Randolph Hearst stated that “The news is what somebody doesn’t want you to print. All else is advertising.” Mark Twain’s observation that “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed” further underscores why verification through questioning remains essential.
Questions Are the Fuel to Enquiry
Taken together, these perspectives suggest that questioning is not an act of antagonism. It is the method by which journalism fulfils its public function. Where engagement is declined, the process of inquiry as earlier stated continues, drawing instead upon the evidence that remains available.
Therefore, avoidance does not prevent scrutiny. It merely shifts the basis upon which that scrutiny is conducted.
CONCLUSION
To protect a journalist is to protect the very mechanism through which a democracy examines and corrects itself. It is an affirmation that power must remain subject to scrutiny and answerable to the public it serves.
The test of our democracy in 2026 will not be found in statements. It will be found in action. Parliamentarians should table and pass an Anti-SLAPP law by March 2027 to dismiss abusive litigation within 60 days. Government must source a dedicated South African Police Services SAPS unit for crimes against journalists and make source protection near-absolute in law.
Citizens must subscribe to one independent outlet this month. If we do not pay for it, we will pay for its absence. A society that permits the silencing of its watchdogs has already begun to surrender its freedoms. In a country where the right to speak was won through the struggle, we cannot now accept a right to silence opinion makers.