Tim Flack: Science behind Sooliman's press - partnering for impact

Key topics:Publicly documented media engagement by Gift of the GiversPR relationships reframed as “partnerships” with journalistsConcerns about influence on press independence and coverage.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Tim Flack.This article concerns the publicly documented pattern of media engagement by Gift of the Givers, as recorded on its own verified Facebook page. It does not question the organisation's humanitarian work or the personal integrity of Dr Imtiaz Sooliman. All factual claims can be verified by visiting the page or the sources cited. The analysis is the author's own..If you wanted to study how a modern organisation builds relationships with the press, you could do worse than the Gift of the Givers Facebook page. Most PR operations leave few traces. The meetings happen off the record. The relationships develop in private. The access is granted quietly and the resulting coverage appears, to the untrained eye, to have emerged from nothing more than good journalism. It is a craft that depends, above all, on invisibility.Gift of the Givers has taken a rather different approach. It has photographed the entire process and posted it online.There is a photograph on the page, posted on 24 June 2025, showing Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, the organisation's founder, standing in the newsroom of News24 alongside six named journalists. A separate post from the same day shows a seventh, receiving a copy of the Gift of the Givers book. The photographs are professionally composed. The captions are warm. The hashtags are precise. By itself, this would be unremarkable. But it is not by itself.The page records that, since mid-2024, Sooliman has met with the editor-in-chief of News24; visited The Witness in Pietermaritzburg to meet its editor and record a podcast; toured The Herald in Gqeberha to meet its new editor and the wider editorial, marketing, and sports teams; partnered with the Daily Maverick and met with its journalists, including its bureau chief in Nelson Mandela Bay; visited Algoa FM to meet its station manager and three named staff members; met a News24 and Netwerk24 journalist whom the page describes as "a close friend of Gift of the Givers"; and met the broadcaster Debora Patta on three separate occasions, the third under the headline "Voices of Truth Must Rise."The broadcast side is equally busy. At least four separate posts document appearances with a single eNCA presenter, who in one is shown describing Sooliman as a "national treasure." Interviews on Newzroom Afrika, including an invitation to "visit one of our sessions." Heart FM. Lotus FM, where he sat for a broadcast in the studio. Radio 2000. East Coast Radio are some of the others..In total: at least twenty-seven documented media engagement posts. Eleven media outlets. More than twenty named journalists and editors. In under two years. All posted voluntarily, with photographs and captions, on a verified page followed by 257K people. Almost none of these engagements produced a published interview or any visible editorial output at the time, some came later. But they produced photographs.The public relations industry is not secretive about how this works. The professional literature is remarkably candid. As PRs we are taught that the most effective method of securing favourable coverage is not the press release, the exclusive, or the lunch. It is the relationship. A journalist who considers you a "friend" will not lead with the unflattering angle. They will not call the critic before calling you. The friendship, in this regard as in life, becomes the filter through which all decisions pass, and because it feels organic rather than engineered, it is almost impossible to identify from the inside. When it works, the friend does not feel managed. They feel respected. The outcome is the same. This is the theory of it all, anyway. PR professionals have a term for journalists who have reached this stage. They call them "friendlies." The practice of maintaining these relationships through access, attention, and the careful distribution of goodwill is not a secret. It is a standard component of industry training. The only unusual thing about the Gift of the Givers operation is that the organisation has chosen to document it, thoroughly. If sending a message was the objective, then objective achieved.It is the language that repays the closest attention. These are not headlines written by the outlets. They are captions written by Gift of the Givers, on its own Facebook page, beneath photographs of Sooliman in the newsrooms. When the organisation visits The Herald, the post is titled "Strengthening Media Partnerships in the Eastern Cape." When it meets Algoa FM, the headline is "Voices That Drive Change: Partnering with Algoa FM." When he meets Debora Patta, the framing is "Voices of Truth Must Rise.".One notes the word "partnerships." In a functioning press relationship, the subject seeks coverage and the journalist provides scrutiny. The two roles are understood to be separate, and in some tension. The language on the Gift of the Givers page does not reflect this tension. It dissolves it. The media house is not positioned as an observer. The media house is a partner. And partnerships, one hardly needs to point out, are not typically characterised by one partner investigating the other. As innocent as this might be an impression is created, and there is the crux of the matter.The description of a working journalist as "a close friend of Gift of the Givers" is perhaps the most instructive detail of all. The phrase appears in a post on the organisation's own page, captioning a photograph of Sooliman with a named News24 and Netwerk24 journalist. Gift of the Givers felt comfortable publishing it. Nobody appears to have objected.In April 2026, Adriaan Basson, the editor-in-chief of News24, published an article titled "Ignore the haters. Imtiaz Sooliman is the best of us." The occasion was a letter signed by approximately 300 UCT alumni, donors, and staff objecting to the university's decision to award Sooliman an honorary doctorate. The signatories raised specific concerns. Several declined to be quoted, citing fears of being targeted in an environment where, as News24's own reporting noted, "dissenting views are not tolerated."They were right to be cautious. The letter had been sent to UCT. UCT was its only recipient. The names were not intended for publication; UCT Renewal, which coordinated the letter, later confirmed that no signatory had consented to being publicly identified. News24 published them anyway, to be fair they mentioned they had blanked out the email addresses. What followed was ugly but unsurprising. A number of those named were subjected to antisemitic abuse online, including in the comments section of posts on the Gift of the Givers Facebook page itself. According to the SA Jewish Report, one signatory, the opera singer Aviva Pelham, was called an "ugly Jewess" and "wh*re" in the comments section of a post shared on the Gift of the Givers Facebook page, after she was singled out as one of 300 alumni and stakeholders who signed a recent letter to the University of Cape Town (UCT). Others have since been named and shamed also..Basson's article defended Sooliman and dismissed the signatories' objections. The previous August, the Gift of the Givers Facebook page had documented his personal meeting with Sooliman. The reader may note that Sooliman himself did not need to respond to his critics. The editor-in-chief of the country's largest digital news platform had done it for him.If a politician were photographed visiting eleven media houses in two years, naming and tagging the editors at each one, describing working journalists as "close friends," and posting the evidence on a page followed by 257K followers, the coverage would be immediate and it would not be kind. The activity would be recognised for what it is. That it has not been, in this instance, is itself a finding worth noting.There is a simple test for whether any of this matters. During the same period that Sooliman was visiting newsrooms, he spoke at a Cape Town rally where the banner read "We are all Hamas" and declared that Zionists "run the world with fear." In a recorded interview on Hilaal TV, he stated that "Islamic law overrides any other law," a claim Africa Check subsequently confirmed as authentic. At a UCT event hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, he described himself as "5,000% antisemitic." In 2011, he received an award from the Union of Good, an organisation designated by the US Treasury as part of Hamas's financing infrastructure.Search for a critical article about any of this in the outlets whose newsrooms Dr Sooliman has visited. I have done the work so you do not have to. You will struggle to find one.If that does not trouble you, then there is nothing to see here. The Gift of the Givers Facebook page is simply a record of a humanitarian organisation being friendly with the press, and the press being friendly in return. These things happen. Nobody is the worse for it..Sooliman, for his part, has his own names for what is happening. On the Gift of the Givers Facebook page, the visits are catalogued under headings like "meeting with a close friend, " "Partnering with SABC," "Strengthening Independent Journalism," and "Building Partnerships for Impact." One admires the directness, even if it appears to be unintentional..If any of this strikes the reader as petty, they are welcome to wait for Part 2, which concerns Dr Sooliman's equally well-documented meetings with South Africa's intelligence chiefs and senior police officials. One suspects the tone of the coverage will be rather different.All factual claims in this article are sourced from posts on the verified Gift of the Givers Facebook page, from Africa Check, from published reporting by News24, the SA Jewish Report, and other South African outlets, and from publicly available records. The analysis constitutes fair comment on matters of public interest. The author welcomes correction of any factual inaccuracy.

Tim Flack: Science behind Sooliman's press - partnering for impact

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