He said, she said, the Sunday Times said – what is really happening with the Trevor Noah story and how did the paper get it all so wrong?

Now the Times have had to do some real ‘back up against the wall’ justification following a clearly disgruntled Trevor Noah firing some shots on Twitter. They have released a blow-by-blow description of how their front-page story quickly went tits up, explained here on TimesLive:

On Thursday last week, we approached his grandmother, Nomalizo Noah, to talk about her famous grandson.

She told us, however, that she did not want to speak immediately as she had just received word that a relative had been murdered…

We visited Noah’s grandmother at her home in Soweto the following day. She repeated the information, speaking about a family curse because two other women in her family had been murdered by their husbands.

Now here’s where the story turned from the profile the paper was originally compiling to the more sensational one that graced the cover. The journalist managed to contact the father of victim Cebisile Happiness Khoza, who then confirmed the family link to Trevor and invited the Sunday Times to attend the funeral. The story was then published and the wheels began to come off.

It seems that Dumisani Khoza, father of Cebisile, may have jumped the gun somewhat and upon being contacted by the paper flat out denied having made the statements:

No, I never said that. They lied and they are talking about something they don’t know.

The story could end there but wait, there’s more. It turns out a relative of the Noah family had been murdered in KZN, a woman named Gugulethu Gwamanda. The family link has been confirmed, although this hasn’t stopped the Sunday Times being widely criticised across the country. We’ll give them the last word here:

…we can never lose sight of the fact that the Sunday Times is a business. We are in the business of selling the news.

…How many readers can we tempt on a Sunday morning into purchasing single copies of the paper based on the appeal of the front page?

Does this always make for good decisions? I would normally say yes. The instance of the Noah front page was not one of them…

We will examine our processes again, put in place mechanisms that will not lead us into the very uncomfortable space we found ourselves in this past week. We take to heart the criticism levelled against us because it will improve our editorial processes and make us more vigilant as editors, reporters and producers of the news.