Finally, News24 has done something positive for South Africa. Ironically, in its constant barrage of divisive headlines and gossip fit for Huisgenoot masquerading as investigative journalism, it has somehow managed to achieve the unity of the rainbow nation once promised by Mandela. Whether you’re left, right, black, white, a Freedom Front Plus or EFF voter, we all agree that News24 sucks.
In the latest episode of Things That Sound Scandalous If We Use Enough Adjectives, News24 has exposed that March and March leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma owns a business. Her husband, Xolani Christopher Zuma, CEO of the SA First Forum, owns businesses. Some of those businesses have done work for the state, like countless other active businesses in the country. There are almost 3 million registered businesses in South Africa and more than 1.2 million suppliers listed on South Africa’s Central Supplier Database. What are the odds?
“Tender bonanza”
The pièce de résistance of this cooked-up “exposé” is that one of their businesses has a R12 million contract with government over a three-year period. Not R12 million stolen, not R12 million in bribes, and not R12 million for work that was never done. It is R12 million in contracts over three years, roughly R4 million a year in turnover before salaries, materials, suppliers, tax and all the other irritating little expenses involved in actually running a business.
It apparently took five journalists to uncover this shocking fact, which News24 dressed up with phrases like “tender bonanza” because “business gets customers” probably didn’t sound sinister enough.
News24 also seems very impressed by the fact that Jacinta and her husband reportedly bought a farm for around R2 million, as though this is supposed to prove they are living like oligarchs. Two million rand for property, a farm no less, in 2022. There are two-bedroom flats in middle-class suburbia that cost more than that. What exactly are we supposed to do with this information, gasp and phone 10111?
The AfriForum scandal that wasn’t
This isn’t News24’s first rodeo when it comes to framing ordinary, garden-variety organisational conduct as scandalous or fraudulent. In July this year, it was AfriForum. After all the dramatic framing and loaded language, the great revelation was that an organisation with hundreds of employees pays salaries, recruits members and spends money on advertising. The horror!
The Jacinta and AfriForum “scandals” are the same. Take completely ordinary financial information, strip away context, add scary words and present it as though something deeply disturbing has been uncovered. AfriForum pays staff? Scandal. Jacinta owns a business? Scandal. Her husband owns businesses? Scandal. They bought property? Good grief! Call the Hawks!
Doxxing for thee, but not for me
Then things became even more absurd. One of the journalists involved in “exposing” Jacinta, Khaya Koko, reportedly had his phone number leaked and received threats via WhatsApp. That is wrong. Threatening journalists is wrong, and publishing someone’s private information so they can be harassed is wrong. But watching News24 suddenly discover this principle has been quite something.
This is the same publication that hunted down an anonymous private X user in May 2025, named him, named his family, published information about his business and gave readers enough information to work out where to find him within minutes. When people objected, the defence was basically that News24 had not technically published his exact street address. So they didn’t publish his address, they just gave you roughly a 100-metre radius of where to find him in a small town, along with photos of him and his business.
He reportedly received numerous calls and threats, his business suffered, and his family had to relocate. But News24 did not print the number on the gate, so it’s obviously fine.
Now one of their own gets targeted and suddenly personal information is sacred, online mobs are dangerous and everyone must understand how frightening it is to have strangers hunting you down. Funny how quickly principles arrive when the tables turn.
“It’s not genocide!”
Then came the editorial invoking genocide. For years, South Africans have raised concerns about inflammatory racial rhetoric, politicians chanting about killing Boers and farmers, and language inciting violence against minorities. We are constantly told to calm down and stop overreacting. There have been countless articles and social media posts from journalists shouting, “It’s NOT genocide!”
But now a News24 journalist receives threats and suddenly we are talking about Rwanda. Suddenly words have consequences. Suddenly inflammatory rhetoric can create a climate of violence. Welcome to the conversation many of us have been trying to have for years. Remember when you threw around terms like white supremacist, racist, neo-Nazi, far-right extremist and whatever other dramatic little label came to mind to shut down people who dared suggest that violent rhetoric leads to violence?
You do not get to wave away dangerous rhetoric when it is aimed at farmers, white South Africans or political opponents, then discover how serious rhetoric can be the moment one of your own journalists is on the receiving end. Either these principles apply consistently or they are not principles at all.
And that is really the problem with News24. The rules seem to change depending on who it has decided is good and who it has decided is bad. If News24 exposes your family, your business and enough information for people to find you, that is investigative journalism. If somebody does something similar to one of its journalists, that is suddenly treated as a life-and-death situation.
Scoring own goals
The funniest part is that News24 may actually have answered one of the questions people were genuinely interested in. There have been endless insinuations about who is funding Jacinta and her movement, with suggestions of mysterious backers, foreign money and shadowy interests. After digging frantically through her financial life, what did News24 find? Businesses. No explosive foreign funding scandal, no secret billionaire benefactor and no corruption case.
That would be news. But if the scandal is simply that Jacinta owns a company and that company has received government work, congratulations, Adriaan Basson, your team of super-serious, uber-professional investigative journalists have discovered commerce.
Perhaps the team at News24 is confused by the concept of a profitable organisation. Media24 reported a US$15 million adjusted operating loss in FY2025, while revenue fell 19%. News24’s own financials are conveniently not broken out separately. Perhaps all this investigative enthusiasm is supposed to help with the numbers. But that is another story for another day.
This is becoming a pattern. Pick the villain, dig through everything connected to them, find ordinary facts, wrap those facts in loaded language and let implication do the work that evidence cannot. We saw it with AfriForum. We saw it with the anonymous man News24 hunted down over posts they didn’t like. Now we are watching it happen with Jacinta.
The death rattle of credibility
The sheer flood of contempt aimed at News24 over the past few days has been quite something to watch. For once, South Africans from wildly different political camps seem to have found common ground, and I have to admit, I feel a little vindicated.
Some of the same people now tearing News24 apart were perfectly happy to cheer on those painfully lame AfriForum “exposés” because they do not like AfriForum. But eventually, this kind of behaviour comes for you too.
Well, here we are.
It seems more South Africans are finally seeing the problem. Corporate media, and News24 in particular, have spent years trying to convince everyone that they are the sensible arbiters of truth and responsible guardians against misinformation, division and propaganda, while increasingly behaving like exactly the kind of partisan activist operation they accuse everyone else of being.
It’s activism dressed up as journalism at best, and the same divisive, narrative-driven propaganda machine it spends so much time warning us about at worst.
And judging by the reaction this time, people have had enough.
For all our disagreements, South Africans have finally managed to unite around something: an overwhelming hatred of News24.
My faith in my fellow South Africans is restored.
Hallelujah! They have finally seen the light.
Leigh-Ann Hallak is a Rational Standard contributor, a critic of mainstream media, censorship, and a proponent of free speech and liberty.