The Gauteng government has instructed the State Attorney to institute legal action against editor of the Pretoria News Piet Rampedi, and the title’s owners, Independent Media, for unsubstantiated claims when ‘misreporting’ a birth of decuplets.
This follows the statement by Independent Media on 16 June that ‘(the) Tembisa 10 story is not fake news but a cover-up of mammoth proportions by Gauteng Health authorities’.
IOL reported: ‘After initiating a private investigation into the birth of the 10 babies, the media organisation said it stood by the stories published in both print and online publications.’
Since then, the national health department said that there was no record of the delivery of decuplets in Gauteng, and that Gosiame Sithole, supposedly the mother, had been taken to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation.
Gauteng spokesperson Thabo Masebe said: ‘It has now been established by medical practitioners that Ms Sithole did not give birth to any babies in recent times. It has also been established that she was not pregnant in recent times.’
Masebe told News24 that the provincial government wanted the media organisation ‘to retract the unfortunate allegations made against the government’ and apologise for alleging that ‘there was a cover-up by the provincial government involving the premier, the MEC and the chief executive of Steve Biko [Academic Hospital]’.
Masebe said that if Independent Media had still belonged to the Press Council, it would have taken that route instead.
This week, in an apology to fellow Independent journalists for the ‘reputational damage’ his poorly researched reporting had caused, Rampedi said: ‘Even though I stand by the fact that Sithole was pregnant, some aspects of the story could have been dealt with differently. Could I have handled the story much better? Definitely! Especially the verification process. Quite honestly, I never treated the decuplets story as an investigation at all. I used no investigative tool or checklist.’