Norman Mailer is a famously powerful critic of the press as an institution. He has been quoted as saying that once a newspaper touches a story the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

When something happens, like the Sunday Times publishing that a rape complaint has been laid against African National Congress deputy president Jacob Zuma, the terrible weight of the press’s many critics in the literary firmament comes depressingly to mind. The stern words of the high priests of the written medium bore down on you. Perhaps they are right after all; perhaps the press is frantic, hysterical, doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, etc, etc.

On the question of whether the Sunday Times should have published the story, personally I’m in a bit of a quandary. I do feel a terrible wrong has been done to Zuma. Even if he wins his court case now, his reputation is blistered forever. There is a claim of rape; that is now, more or less, undisputed. But what if the claim is false? Zuma’s supporters have often said that his civil rights have been trampled, since he is “innocent until proven guilty”. Until last Sunday, I thought this was a debatable point — true, but also something of a propagandistic ploy by his supporters rather than a genuine claim about moral rectitude. But if it was not true then, it certainly is now.

There is another side to this, however. I also think something as dramatic as a rape claim — in the context of the clashing of horns associated with the presidential succession battle — could not have been suppressed. Perhaps it is better for it to be out there than for it to run riot down the rumour highway, which can often be more devastating and, for all the criticism of the press, less accurate.

It is an old legal maxim that hard cases make bad law. The dynamic is similar in the press. Close calls usually make for controversial results. They are not so much the guide for future decision-making as the definition of a journalistic minefield. Often not publishing something can be as injurious to the common weal as publishing it. Imagine the injury to history if the editor of the Washington Post had decided that publishing the Watergate story was too risky.

So, what do you do? You do what you can. You ask as many questions as possible. You try to get answers. You try to judge what is most likely and most consistent with the facts. And then you hope like hell. You really need a heart of stone to have no sympathy at all for an editor in a situation like this.

But there is an enormous irony in all of this. And that is the deliberate smearing (in the US they call it “sliming”, which actually sounds more accurate) of the character of former Scorpions head Bulelani Ngcuka by what you might call “the Zuma camp”.

The situation was not dissimilar. An editor was faced with a tough decision that had to be made quickly. There were apparently credible people claiming Ngcuka was an apartheid spy, backed up with documents and with assurances from shadowy but indisputably senior sources. Some claim the “source” in this situation was Zuma himself.

Once again it was a close call, and the editor decided to hit the go button. The story ended up being false, but a strange and awful lesson was learned. The South African press is open to manipulation. Its ranks are too shallow, and a forceful thrust can breach its flimsy defences.

It is not a well known fact, but the ultimate prize in journalism in the US, the Pulitzer prize, was instituted not so much to honour journalistic accomplishment, but rather to help bend back the springs of action which might lead the press toward dysfunction. The initiator of the prize, Joseph Pulitzer, said “a cynical, mercenary, demagogic, corrupt press will produce in time a people as base as itself”.

These words are in fact inscribed on the gateway to the Columbia School of Journalism.

Yet the political temptation to use the press to slime someone exists everywhere. For all these proud and austere words, there is at the moment a classic sliming fandango going on in the US about whether “the Bush camp” leaked the fact that Valerie Plame, the wife of US diplomat Joseph Wilson, was a CIA agent, which is illegal in US law.

Plame suggested her husband investigate whether Niger had sold uranium for nuclear enrichment to Iraq. He did, and concluded that it had not, then later became a prominent critic of President George Bush’s justification for war. But the Bush spin doctors, at least as vociferous as those in the Mbeki presidency, fed the story to the press, implying, “Oh, you can't believe his story, he only got the job because of his wife”. In other words, the reports of Iraqi nuclear designs might actually have been correct.

In short, and I hate to say it, Norman Mailer might be right. But he is only right in isolation.

Readers need to judge the press not on a single story, but on the balance of what is printed collectively over time. Eventually, the truth will out. And with that fact, Zuma can be somewhat consoled. And fearful.

Cohen is editor at large.

With acknowledgements to Tim Cohen and the Business Day.