10. Principle of best current evidence

In a series whose main concern is misinformation, which we have unequivocally presented as something very bad, it is worth asking what its opposite is. The obvious answer is information that is true; news publications should aim to inform readers by telling the truth, not misinform readers by presenting what is false as true.

Indeed, Daily Maverick, one of South Africa’s leading publications, has the strapline: “Defend Truth”. It’s a noble and worthy aim for a publication. But it is often hard to know what the truth is. News stories are often published under tight deadlines in which there is a lack of publicly available information, or what is available is contradictory or murky.

In the GroundUp newsroom, we try to apply the principle of the best current evidence. Here are two examples of what is meant by this.

Example one: origins of Covid

How did SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, begin infecting humans? Here are four options.

1. It crossed from live animals to humans in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan.

2. The virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

3. The virus spread through cold food supply chains.

4. Scientists with expertise in this area have no idea.

We like posing this question because the way it is answered, especially by news publications, demonstrates one’s approach to truth.

Option 2 has been increasingly promoted by institutions of the US government. Option 3 has been pushed by the Chinese government. Both are examples of state-supported misinformation: politically motivated theories with very little evidence to support them. Option 4 is simply not true. There is compelling evidence that the answer is option 1. Of course the evidence may change with time, but journalists cannot be expected to be clairvoyant. The best we can do is declare, based, on the current evidence what is likely to be true. As evidence changes, we may need to review what we declare to be true, but there is no shame in that. On the contrary, declaring something a fact, when unsupported by the current evidence, should be seen as poor journalism, even if new evidence later comes to light that supports our originally declared fact.

What constitutes the best publicly available evidence is something that reasonable people should be able to agree on much of the time, albeit not always.

And yet a BBC report as recently as January 2025 states: “There is no consensus on the cause of the Covid pandemic. Some support a ‘natural origin’ theory, which argues the virus spread naturally from animals, without the involvement of any scientists or laboratories.”

This is mealy-mouthed journalism. Most scientists with expertise in the field agree that Covid started spreading to humans from animals in the Huanan market. Compelling evidence of this was published in 2022 and, if anything, the evidence for this has strengthened since then.

Example two: Thabo Bester's escape from prison

On 3 May 2022 South Africa's Department of Correctional Services reported that the convicted rapist and murderer Thabo Bester, also known as the Facebook rapist, had burnt to death in his cell in a maximum security prison. This was false. Bester, in collusion with prison officials, had conducted an audacious, far-fetched and, yet, successful escape. He conspired with his celebrity girlfriend, Dr Nandipha Magudumana, to steal a corpse from a morgue, place it in his cell and set it alight.

Months later, following a tip-off, GroundUp began investigating the story, eventually bringing to light what happened, which led to the high-profile arrest of Bester and Magudumana in Tanzania after they fled South Africa.

Consider this photo:

1. It is real.

2. It is fake.

3. Don’t know.

The above photo was circulated on Twitter. A few of us in the GroundUp newsroom discussed whether it’s fake or real and we couldn’t reach consensus. On Twitter, it was accepted at face value by some. By others it was laughed off. Today we still do not know whether it is real or not.

Now compare it to these two photos:

These photos were first published on the GroundUp website on 16 March 2023. We know now that they show Bester and his girlfriend shopping in Woolworths in Sandton in June 2022. They proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Bester was alive and had escaped from prison, contrary to the claims of the Department of Correctional Services and the private security company, G4S, that ran the prison.

To us these photos exemplify the difference between news as it is published on digital platforms like Twitter/X and on news publications. It is hard to know what to do with the photo of Zuma and Bester. Its origin is unknown. Its context is unknown. There is no source we can contact to find out more. It could be legitimate; it could be fake, but how do we proceed with it? How does it fit into our understanding of events in the real world? Currently it doesn’t; it simply adds to the confusion.

On the other hand, this is why we published the other photos of Bester and Magudumana:

• On 15 March 2023 GroundUp published a story titled: Did the Facebook rapist die in his cell? Or did he escape from prison? It was our third story on Bester since November 2022. The previous two had not been widely read. But this one “went viral”. It provided substantial evidence that Bester had escaped from prison and not died, as the government had claimed. But because the evidence was not 100% definitive, we did not decisively conclude that Bester had escaped. Instead, we listed the evidence we had gathered that supports the theory and wrote: “Extraordinary evidence raises doubts about the claim that Thabo Bester died in a fire at Mangaung prison in May 2022”.
• The next day, a person emailed us the photos showing a man who looked like Bester shopping in Woolworths. She didn’t post them on Twitter. Instead she contacted GroundUp and explained the context in which the photos were taken. All she requested was anonymity. She was actually taking a celebrity shot of Magudumana and apparently did not realise until she read our story that she had inadvertently photographed Bester.
• We were able to verify the photo by communicating with the source, checking the metadata on it including the timestamp and GPS location. It was no doubt Magudumana in the photo. Her young daughter also appeared in the picture. But Bester looked different than in the most recent available photos of him, which were from before he went to prison in 2011. The man in the picture was wearing sunglasses and had grown his hair and beard. After closely comparing his facial features with the available reference photos, and consulting a prison guard who had seen him shortly before his escape, we were confident it was Bester. But once again, because we did not have definitive proof, we erred on the side of caution.
• On 16 March we published the pictures and wrote:

  “GroundUp has seen photographs of a man who closely resembles 'Facebook rapist' Thabo Bester shopping in Woolworths in Sandton City nearly two months after his reported death in prison. The photograph shows him with long hair, wearing a tracksuit and sunglasses."

There was some scepticism in our newsroom about Bester's escape for months after we began investigating the story. The truth only became unequivocally clear long after we began publishing, when the Department of Correctional Services finally admitted that Bester had escaped.

Until then all we could do was to use the best available evidence, and to tell readers what we were doing and why.

But many people get their news from digital platforms, which do not encourage the principle of using the best available evidence. Instead they encourage users to be first to publish, and even to make sensational claims, which often turn out to be wrong.