[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Whites' ways in the new SA

[David Everatt]

My best was driving the kids home from school as results came out, they 
knew ANC were on the brink of 2/3, and what was the headline in The 
Star? "Zille poised for victory!" plus a full page colour pic and story. 
It was the best possible political education for the kids - I didn't 
have to say a word, they (11 and 13) worked it out for themselves. Which 
is more than can be said for most of the hacks writing it.





____________________ 

David Everatt 

Johannesburg



Dominic Tweedie wrote:
> I think the main article was written by Janet Smith.
>
> There was hardly any coverage of the ANC campaign in the bourgeois
> papers, but there is room for this shite as David calls it and i
> agree.
>
> It's tempting to call them the white papers, even if their readership
> and writership is majority black these days.
>
> The first I saw that really got into the phenomenon that was the ANC
> campaign did not come out until it was all over. That was the article
> called "Bringing sexy back to politics" by Paddy Harper, Mpumelelo
> Mkhabela, Nkululeko Ncana and Moipone Malefane, published yesterday in
> the Jhb Sunday Times, and which I will post here after this comment.
>
> Presumably the word went out to the white papers that no reflection of
> the ANC campaign was to be allowed for fear of adding to any ANC
> bandwagon effect there migth be. They were to be starved of the
> "oxygen of publicity" as Thatcher once called it, a propos of the IRA.
>
> Then, after the event, and with the small exception of the Sunday
> Times, these supposed mass media have carried right on filling their
> pages with irrelevance. Who actually cares about the whites? Do the
> whites themselves even care about the whites? Personally, I wish there
> were more whites in the SACP and the ANC, but please God, not too many
> more! Not if it means more of this white shite.
>
> Really, as communicators we now have a false situation where the
> larger part of reality is mostly blanked out in these public prints
> and rediffusions in favour of the petty. I mean for example Tsephiso
> Makwetla interviewing Chris Landsberg, or Jeremy Maggs interviewing
> Steven Friedman for the umpteenth time. I mean Brigalia Bam not even
> managing to announce the ANC victory at the count. And now this
> nostalgia of Janet Smith and Heidi Holland and Charlene Smith taking
> us down a drab memory lane that has nothing to do with the passion of
> practically two out of every three South Africans of today.
>
> It is actually an abdication. There is a real mass medium that is
> reaching tens of millions of South Africans, seriously, and touching
> their feelings and engaging their minds. But that medium is not the
> papers or the TV. They have copped out. It is the African National
> Congress itself that is taking to the people. It is its own mass
> medium.
>
> So never mind about what the whites did them-days. What are they going
> to do right now, about the snooty falseness of the mass media that
> they buy every day? Let's see it, guys!
>
> Janet Smith can actually turn a phrase. She is wasted on this kind of material.
>
> Domza,
>
>
>
> 2009/4/27 Mandi Smallhorne <mandiwrite at icon.co.za>:
>   
>> I have no problem with talking to hacks - after all, I am one myself - but
>> why choose Holland as one of just two commentators - she's a Zimbabwean and
>> I don't think, not sure, that she was here in the 1980s? It didn't ring true
>> to me - who wrote it? (I mean, to start with, I've not heard practically any
>> whites say they voted ANC in 1994, maybe one or two, so that's rubbish in my
>> view...)
>> M
>>     
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