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Ruling (Leave to Appeal)

Lourens Grové vs News24  

, ,

BEFORE THE APPEALS PANEL OF THE PRESS COUNCIL OF SOUTH AFRICA

In the matter between:

Lourens Grové                                                                                Applicant

and

News24                                                                                      Respondent

Matter No: 32347/09/2025

 

DECISION ON AN APPLICATIONN FOR LEAVE TO APPEAL

  1. The applicant is Mr Lourens Grové; News24 is the respondent. The applicant seeks leave to appeal a Ruling by the Deputy Press Ombud dated 20 December 2025 which dismissed the applicant’s complaint against the respondent. The complaint, based on the alleged breach of clauses of the Press Code, followed an on-line publication of an article on 20 September 2025 with the headline: “Trump says his negative media coverage is ‘illegal’”. The real dispute was about the interpretation of what Mr Trump was alleged to have said. For the reasons that will appear later, it is not necessary to engage the debate on the merits of the case; that is, about the substance of Mr Trump’s statement. Suffice to say that the respondent disputed the interpretation placed by the applicant on its article. In fact, the respondent argued that its article conveyed an understanding of Mr Trump’s statement the way it was understood internationally. I now turn to the real points, namely, whether the applicant had locus standi to lodge the complaint, and whether the interpretation of Mr Trump crossed the line into distortion.
  2. The Public Advocate had declined to accept the complaint on the above two grounds. The applicant then persisted with the complaint to the level of the Deputy Press Ombud; hence the above Ruling.
  3. The respondent opposes the application for leave to appeal on the grounds that it has no prospects of success; in fact, it sees the persistence with the complaint as an abuse of the process.
  4. In my view, the application lacks prospects of success on two fronts.
  5. Firstly:
    • The applicant has no locus standi. In this respect, I disagree with the Deputy Ombud; the process through which he granted the applicant locus standi, would open the floodgates for people with no real interest in the matter. Under the guise of public interest, the applicant is in effect complaining on behalf of Mr Trump, without his sanctioning.
    • Secondly, I agree, again, with the Public Advocate that the interpretation of what Mr Trump said – as evident from the international discourse – does not come anywhere near a distortion and therefore offensive to the Press Code.

The matter should have ended there.

  1. The second front on which the application fails is that, in any case, having dealt with the merits when it did not have to, the Ruling adequately did so in dismissing the complaint. I need not go into that in light of what stands in the preceding paragraph.
  2. The application would fail before the Appeals Panel on several fronts; it therefore has no prospects of success and it is therefore dismissed.

Dated this 25th day of March 2026.

Judge B M Ngoepe, Chair, Appeals Panel.

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