WATCH: SA media faultlines further exposed by amaBhungane’s befuddling response – Palm
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Bizarre tweets by Micah Reddy, the Africa co-ordinator of the National Endowment for Democracy-funded International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, have laid bare the scramble for damage control among the US-influenced media houses and journalists in South Africa.
So says Roscoe Palm, a director of the Pan-African Institute for Socialism, who appeared on Dr. Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh’s Unfiltered show late last week where he spoke about the US / Nato interference in the South African mediascape.
Palm had previously co-authored two reports, one with Ajit Singh of No Cold War entitled “Manufacturing Consent: How the US has penetrated South African Media” , and another co-authored with Dr Phillip Dexter entitled “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Capture of South African ‘Independent’ Media by the U.S. State and Big Capital”.
Both reports demonstrate a pattern of interference and a flow of resources to sovereign states in the global South, particularly through funders and philanthropic projects with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) being one of the most problematic. The NED, known as the “second CIA,” was set up in 1983 to conduct overtly what was no longer viable for the CIA to do covertly. It funds civil society organisations, public figures, and media organisations to push an imperialist US worldview and a regime change agenda.
The Daily Maverick’s Brenthurst connection
The issue that was particularly in Palm’s crosshairs is the blurred lines between the Brenthurst Foundation and the Daily Maverick, a prominent South African online news and opinion publication. The Brenthurst Foundation was established by South African oligarchs, the Oppenheimer family. Frequent contributors on international relations to the Daily Maverick, Greg Mills and his research assistant Ray Hartley, recycle copy that comes directly from the Brenthurst Foundation site.
The Brenthurst Foundation also paid for the trip of pro-Western opposition leader, John Steenhuisen to Ukraine. Bizarrely, the story on Steenhuisen’s trip published in the Daily Maverick quotes Greg Mills, who is contemporaneously an Editor-At-Large of the Daily Maverick as confirmed in an accreditation letter written by Daily Maverick Editor Branko Brkic. This means that the Daily Maverick sat on a public interest story for many days when the mysterious funder was a part of the publication all along.
MORE FROM PAIS | CORRESPONDENCE REVEALS MILLS, BRKIC, OPPENHEIMERS AS US PROPAGANDISTS
Palm outlined his case for how the blurred lines between the Brenthurst Foundation and the Daily Maverick enables the US State Department and Nato to mainline propaganda directly into the South African discourse, and why such content should be labelled as sponsored content.
Micah Reddy and amaBhungane’s bizarre response
In a bizarre tweetstorm well into the early hours of Saturday morning, investigative journalist Micah Reddy sprang to the defence of Greg Mills and the Daily Maverick, while attacking PAIS.
Palm said “To those for whom it is unclear as to why Micah Reddy, would jump through hoops to defend Mills, who writes in a different publication, Micah is the Africa head of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who receive NED funding. It is telling that an investigative journalist of a NED-funded institution would take shots publicly for a Nato General’s advisor, supposedly for the sake of media ethics.”
It is also noteworthy that amaBhungane chose NOT to accept an invitation to appear on Unfiltered with Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, but instead issued a statement that did not answer the pertinent questions that were asked. In the statement, amaBhungane was at pains to point out how transparent they were, but it failed to answer questions written in the original studies.
Although amaBhungane claims that they “do not take funding to investigate specific stories or themes,” this appears to be contradicted by OSF’s financial disclosure. According to OSF, in 2016 “we initiated high-agency work on state capture through our research and advocacy partners” and provided funding to amaBhungane and Daily Maverick specifically “to commence research on the extent of state capture in South Africa” and “on the extent to which state-owned enterprises have been captured by vested interests”.
More concerning, however, is the revolving door between amaBhungane staff and U.S. and Western government-sponsored organizations. In the past decade, three of amaBhungane’s senior staff have gone on to work for such entities, primarily to monitor public and private actors in Africa:
- Vinayak Bhardawaj, former advocacy coordinator (2012-14), has gone on to work for Africa Check, which is partnered with the U.S. Embassy in South Africa to “tackle misinformation and disinformation in the media.”
- Karabo Rajuili, former advocacy coordinator (2015-19), has gone on to work for Open Ownership, a corporate ownership watchdog founded by the U.K. government which focuses on Africa and Asia.
- Cherese Thakur, former advocacy coordinator (2020-22), has subsequently joined the corruption reporting team at the South African office of the German government’s international development agency, GIZ.
Beyond this, amaBhungane’s fellowship program has frequently served as a hub to train U.S. government-affiliated journalists in the region. Since 2015, at least 15 amaBhungane fellows have been directly tied to U.S. government programs, including Voice of America staff, members of U.S. embassy-partnered media organizations, U.S. State Department fellows, and employees of the U.S. government-sponsored think tank Freedom House. amaBhungane has also led the formation of a regional investigative journalism network, IJ Hub, in partnership with the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), an NED-sponsored organization that has formed official partnerships with U.S. embassies in the region. According to organizational filings for 2021, amaBhungane has “incubated” the network, which currently has members in Lesotho, Namibia, Malawi, Eswatini, Botswana, Zambia, and South Africa.
