News24 | Wendy Knowler tells Rhodes graduates: Assume nothing, check everything

Rhodes University awarded News24 consumer journalist Wendy Knowler an honorary Doctor of Laws on Friday, in recognition of nearly three decades of consumer journalism that held powerful institutions to account and gave ordinary South Africans a voice.

Read her acceptance address at the university’s graduation ceremony in full.

Thank you to Rhodes University for this extraordinary honour.

I did not study here, but as a journalist, I have long known this university’s reputation, and the very long list of exceptional journalists who have come through it. So, to be awarded a Doctor of Laws by a university with this history and standing is quite overwhelming. I am enormously grateful. Thank you.

And huge congratulations to all of you graduating today. You have done the assignments, written the exams, met the deadlines and done the work that actually earns a degree. Mine has arrived by a rather different, totally unexpected route.

I have spent most of the past 28 years reading terms and conditions, arguing about insurance policies, asking companies awkward questions and answering emails from people who have reached the end of their tether and are in desperate need of someone to fight for them. It’s turned out to be an incredibly rewarding and fulfilling way to make a living.

Here are some of the things the work has taught me.

Assume nothing. Check everything. And be especially suspicious when a company is making things convenient for you. It’s almost always going to cost you more.

Case in point: when buying a car, don’t sit back and let the dealership’s finance person “find you the best finance deal.” Big mistake. The best deal is the one you source yourself after contacting the competing banks.

Read the small print. Keep the receipt. Get it in writing. Ask another question. Don’t assume that because something has become the norm, it is right. And don’t assume that the first answer is the final answer.

I certainly didn’t have much worked out when I was young. I got As for English but thoroughly mediocre marks for most other subjects, and I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

But one of my school friends was Gigha Shearer. Gigha’s mother, Colleen Shearer, wrote the Talking Shop consumer column for the Sunday Tribune in KwaZulu-Natal for 19 years. She spent seven of those years lobbying Parliament and taking on the South African Optometric Association for consumers’ right to buy affordable reading glasses at supermarkets and pharmacies. And she won.

So, all those who’ve bought ‘cheapie’ glasses from their local pharmacy have my role model to thank for that.

Colleen was also known to rope in Gigha and her friends for her research, such as putting hair-removal creams to the test. She smeared competing brands of the smelly stuff onto our teenage legs, documented how well they worked, or didn’t, and published the results, along with a black-and-white photograph of us, mid-study, in the newspaper.

Somewhere in all of that, Colleen decided that journalism would be a good fit for me. I was 16 or 17 at the time.

My father, a businessman, was not in agreement. At all. “Journalists drink too much and earn too little,” he said. To be fair, he wasn’t entirely wrong at the time.

So, I had a gap year. I waitressed, and I taught typing and shorthand at a Durban secretarial college. Then I spent a year attempting a BCom to please my dad. Eventually, I made my way to journalism school. From the very first lecture, I knew I had found my place.

So clearly Colleen had seen something in me that I hadn’t seen myself.

I had been a journalist for 13 years, and had just given birth to my first child, when my editor at The Mercury asked me to start writing about consumer affairs on my return from maternity leave. A panel of readers had requested it, apparently. That was 1998.

I had to figure the job out myself. The various editors I worked under didn’t really know what the job involved either. So, they left me alone to get on with it, apart from occasionally calling me in to discuss letters from disgruntled companies or their lawyers.

I just kept doing it. Newspapers, digital news platforms, radio, and now TikTok.

‘Work hard on things that come easy’

I’m so grateful to the thousands of people who have shared their consumer disasters with me over the years, from all backgrounds and corners of this extraordinary country, including a few from people in prison. Every day, a new batch of stories lands in my inbox, ranging from the likes of the owner of a Camps Bay mansion with a walk-in fridge problem to a domestic worker in a small town who didn’t get the lay-by refund she was legally entitled to. I know what I know because they shared their stories with me.

I became proficient because I found my thing, quite a niche thing, and I stuck with it. I’ve played a long game, one week at a time. Author James Clear puts it simply: “Work hard on the things that come easy.”

I have a particular interest in the language corporates use with their customers. Often, it’s overly formal and condescending, “Kindly take note that…”, or it isn’t clear and unambiguous enough for lay people to comprehend, especially those for whom English is a second language.

After years of reading rejection letters and listening to recordings of telesales calls, it has become very easy for me to spot how someone’s rights have been trampled on, or whether the script was written with a second-language English speaker in mind.

I really enjoy interrogating those cases. Last year, a Midrand man had his R100 000 car accident claim rejected because, the insurer said, he had not been truthful about his insurance history when he took out the policy. Technically, yes. But when I listened to the call recording, it was very clear to me that he hadn’t intentionally lied. He had misunderstood the question, which could – and should - have been asked in a much clearer way.

I suggested the decision be reviewed. It was: the claim was paid, and, gratifyingly, that part of the script was reworded. That put me on a high for days.

I could not have done this work for 28 years without media organisations being prepared to give me a platform. Consumer journalism is commercially awkward. The company you are asking difficult questions of is often advertising with the company that employs you.

But in all these years, only one editor censored me so as not to displease our advertisers. He succeeded in killing my column once, and the second time he tried to do it, I fought back hard. In the heat of our argument, I pointed to the framed commitment on his office wall. It was a version of “to give the news impartially, without fear or favour”. I told him that if the column was pulled, he’d better take that down, too. Reluctantly, he let it go to print. And the advertiser backlash he was so sure would happen didn’t.

That aside, the media organisations I have worked for have trusted me to do a fair and thorough job and backed me fully.

It has become fashionable to bash mainstream media, and goodness knows we don’t always get it right. But those platforms which offer consumer journalism as a service to readers and listeners deserve huge credit, in my opinion.

There is an uncomfortable aspect to my job. When an ordinary person has spent weeks, months or even years trying in vain to get a company to answer them or give them what they are entitled to, I can usually get a response and a fix within hours. Same person. Same problem. Same facts. Different email address.

Someone commented under the announcement of this honorary degree that her mother’s advice had been, more than once: “If they won’t help you, tell them you’ll write to Wendy Knowler. You’ll see how fast they behave.”

I loved that. But there is something very wrong with it, too.

Nobody should need the intervention of a journalist in order to be treated fairly. But the reality is that they often do. I’ve worked hard for that access, so I use it to help people who haven’t been able to get a fair or just outcome on their own.

You are also going to acquire things other people don’t have. Knowledge. Contacts. Access. A title. Influence. You will find yourself in rooms other people can’t get into. When that happens, it is worth remembering who isn’t in the room. In my world, that’s the person stuck in a call-centre loop, or the person whose insurance claim has been rejected and who doesn’t understand why.

Find work that matters to you

There is another reason I recommend being of service to others. It feels really good.

The late Dolly Parton spoke about this beautifully. She said doing something for somebody else made her heart feel good, and that she became addicted to the feeling of giving. I don’t have a vast fortune to make people’s lives better in the way she did, but I know exactly what she meant.

If I’m having a bad day or the social media trolls are being particularly toxic, engaging with consumers who’ve emailed me about their problems is guaranteed to lift me.

And that brings me back to today. In July 1996, an extraordinary ceremony was held on the lawns of Buckingham Palace. Nelson Mandela received eight honorary doctorates from British universities, including Oxford and Cambridge. At the time, I was a young foreign correspondent based in London, and I witnessed those universities bestowing their highest honours upon him, one after the other, from the press pen.

Thirty years later, I am standing at Rhodes University receiving a Doctor of Laws myself. I can’t adequately explain how utterly surreal this feels.

Knowler at the Rhodes University graduation ceremony on Friday.

Gunnar Sigge

The only downside to this work, for me, is living with the guilt of not being able to take up more cases. My inbox is always far bigger than my capacity. People write to me in desperation, and some of them never get an answer. That weighs heavily on me.

An honour like this doesn’t make me feel that my work is done. Quite the opposite. In the years I have left in this role, I will be ever mindful of the need to live up to this recognition. To honour it.

My hope for you is that you also find work that matters to you. And that you do what it takes to get really good at it. I hope you remain curious enough to keep asking awkward questions. I hope you keep your integrity when doing so is inconvenient. And when you acquire knowledge, access or influence that others don’t have, I hope you use it to help them.

Most Sunday evenings, when a lot of people are dreading Monday morning, I’m wondering what will be waiting in my inbox and truly looking forward to getting stuck in. I think that makes me extraordinarily lucky.

My hope is that you find your version of that. Again, huge congratulations on what you have achieved. Assume nothing. Check everything. And when something convincing appears on your screen, as it will, remember that “check everything” applies to information as much as it does to insurance policies. Find something you can get really good at. Keep asking questions. And use what you learn to help somebody else.