In 52 years of journalism I’ve made my fair share of apologies, corrections and retractions. It happens. Print journalism is particularly demanding. Online, things helpfully vanish to below the screen, but you can’t fix a print caption that spells a name incorrectly, or a headline that doesn’t work, or a poor judgment. You can’t change a wrong fact. They’re in the paper for the whole day and a whole week if you appear on a Sunday. I stick to print where possible. Though it is losing the race for attention, it is still the discipline I rate. Part of that has been to avoid criticism of other journalists. Whatever you accuse someone of one day you are likely to find yourself on the other end of the same stick before long. So I only very reluctantly respond to an article I’ve just read by my friend Adriaan Basson. He is the editor in chief of News24, the behemoth news title of the day, marauding raider of newsroom talent wherever it finds it and publisher of some of the most blistering exposés of political and financial corruption of our time. It has been a huge success. I’ve become so accustomed to News24 nailing the right people for the right indecencies that I realised on reading Basson’s article on Tuesday morning that I may have been in a state of suspension of sorts ever since the KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner, Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, stood up at a news conference in Durban on July 6 last year. He told us our state, police and intelligence services and our politics in general were rotten to the core. I was impressed. Business leaders I know in KwaZulu-Natal held this guy in high regard. But while I waited for the country to come round to the same point of view I found myself adrift. I ventured a column supportive of Mkhwanazi, but it was somehow hard to be sure. Even as an untidy parliamentary inquiry got under way, followed by the magnificent judicial inquiry under retired judge Mbuyiseli Madlanga, I found myself uncertain in my own judgments of what I was hearing and reluctant to comment on proceedings. Why? To be honest, I think I may have been waiting for News24, or its leadership, to stand behind Mkhwanazi, or at least the thrust of his allegations. But they never did. There was always a scepticism, and it bothered me. What did they know that I didn’t? They seemed to take sides in a very complex story and I assumed they were just better informed, their judgment more sound, despite what I was hearing and watching on television. I thought Mkhwanazi did well before both inquiries, but I never said so. I thought the same about the head of crime intelligence, Dumisani Khumalo, being arrested, suspended and charged with fraud for hiring a young woman from BMW’s huge IT division in South Africa and making her a brigadier. But if News24 didn’t rate them, what did I know better? Now that the primary source of the actions taken against Khumalo, Andrea Johnson, the head of the Independent Directorate Against Corruption inside the National Prosecuting Authority, has exposed herself at the Madlanga commission as a liar and a fraud, in thrall to despicable people at crime intelligence (for whom her husband works), the News24 leaders have suddenly changed their position. On Tuesday Basson wrote the nearest thing yet to a retraction of what I’ve assumed to be the News24 position. “We were not hard enough on Johnson,” he said. That is a big moment. Damage has been done, and in media it doesn’t always completely repair. I’ll forever be the guy who endorsed Bantu Holomisa and Cyril Ramaphosa in elections, for example. Still, only editors can right the mistakes they or their people make. I remember apologising for repeatedly criticising former minister Ebrahim Patel’s actions against the construction industry for colluding on the 2010 stadium tenders. I apologised to Eskom for doubting its ability to restore its energy availability factor. There were many others ― my own and my colleagues’. The apologies matter, I like to think. It’s not easy, and thousands of faceless haters will howl at what they take as a sign of weakness. But unless I’m a singular idiot it seems my friend may in this case have opted for a passive concession, a pivot perhaps, without the penitence. He’s in what cricketers call the corridor of uncertainty. Does he try and hit the ball or leave it? Whatever stroke he chooses is strictly personal and I’ll keep up my subscription to News24 no matter. Mistakes happen, and organised commercial journalism is so expensive and so brittle (Media24 may be about to make a number of staff redundant) and so important that I genuinely believe we would be lost without it.• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.