Have a closer look at the book:

1) Read the preface;
2) have a look at the contents page; or 
3) read a sample chapter, Writing Race.

Read Tara Turkington's review, below.

The book is available from leading bookstores, or you can order it by emailing This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . You can also order from www.kalahari.net, by clicking here.

“Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,” the old newsroom quip dryly goes.

Of course, writing stories and headlines that are strong enough to sell newspapers and lead broadcast news bulletins, while simultaneously being balanced and fair, and tight enough to fit in limited space and time constraints, is not as easy as it may look from the outside.

Publishing and broadcasting news is a complex juggling act requiring vast skill, knowledge and the seemingly antithetical applications of creativity and restraint, all under the hot lights of extreme, deadline-driven pressures.

It’s in this stressful, fast-paced environment that journalists and editors often make ethical errors of judgement that can cost them and their organisations dearly.

In his excellent, meticulously researched new book, Black, White and Grey on ethics in modern South African journalism, Franz Krüger describes a range of interesting case studies in which the editors and journalists have simply dropped the balls they’ve been juggling, or at least could have thrown them in different ways.

The book’s first case study examines the well-known, 2003 case in which the City Press newspaper ran a story claiming the high-profile director of public prosecutions in South Africa, Bulelani Ngcuka, had been an apartheid spy. The story was written by Ranjeni Munusamy, a Sunday Times reporter who took her story to the rival paper when her own wouldn’t publish it, on grounds that it hadn’t been researched well enough. The subsequent publication of the story in City Press led to the much-publicised Hefer Commission, which eventually found Ngcuka had, in fact, probably never been a spy.

Part of the joy of Black, White and Grey, is that, while balanced, Kruger doesn’t always sit on the sidelines, but actually calls some ethical fouls. In the Ngcuka case, he finds that Munusamy and City Press did not have enough evidence for the story to pass the accuracy test, that the motives of the story’s chief sources were suspect, that Munusamy was disloyal to the Sunday Times by giving the story to a rival paper and that City Press editor Vusi Mona had insufficient grounds for breaking confidentiality when he divulged details of an off-the-record briefing he’d attended with Ngcuka.

Krüger’s abundance of recent examples such as the Ngcuka saga makes his book all the more pertinent for the practice of journalism here and now in South Africa. He recalls, for instance, the case of respected and talented columnist Darrel Bristow-Bovey, who copied large tracts of his book, The Naked Bachelor, from Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Big Country, and subsequently lost the ability to publish columns in newspapers across the country; the case in which the Sowetan digitally manipulated a picture to make it look like MP Tony Yengeni had bought a copy of the paper outside a Pretoria courtroom where he was standing trial for corruption; and the case of the Zimbabwe Daily News editor, Geoff Nyarota, who was tricked into running a false story about a woman who had been decapitated by Zanu-PF supporters, and was subsequently arrested and tried for it.

Black, White and Grey covers a wide range of areas concerning ethics, including accuracy, fairness, independence, race and gender, privacy, and death and Aids, employing a mix of sources and examples from South Africa, Africa and the world at large to do so. The book is well referenced and authoritative, but is by no means a long, boring, inaccessible, academic treatise.

Short, provocative pieces headlined “Talking Points” by some of the country’s best known journalists provide additional colour. Among others, umAfrika editor Cyril Mdlala argues that the country is lacking a critical, respected press that treats readers as thinking citizens more than just consumers. Business Day journalist Rehana Rossouw puts the case for a new alternative press with a mission to educate people, particularly to combat the spread of Aids, “the disease which has sprouted a new struggle in South Africa”, and Wits Journalism professor and Mail&Guardian founder Anton Harber articulates the pros (and cons) of advocacy journalism. 

The book also provides a smorgasbord of practical tips and exercises, like tests for accuracy, fairness and independence, an ethics roadmap for working through ethical dilemmas; discussion points and exercises and examples of professional codes of professional conduct.

Black, White and Grey is a handbook that any juggler in what might cheekily be referred to as the professional media circus – whether a journalist, editor or student – should be afraid to go on stage without reading first.