Media Flaws

The past few days have been something else. I’ve been in the Eastern Cape and just got back to the Cape this morning. Phew! A breath of fresh air from all this Cape Town nonsense and subtle racial shenanigans.

Now when travelling I tend to keep to a strict local/native media diet of wherever I am – so when in the Eastern Cape – I just stuck to the Daily Dispatch.

I see Sandile Memela and Eddie Botha are kicking up a storm as regular columnists in the Dispatch. And one really refreshing thing about their writing – although I do not subscribe to their highly polemic often utopian views – is that they write about stuff other than what we saw on the news last night. It was refreshing to say the least. And made me miss Tom Eaton’s Mail & Guardian rambles. You see I’m fatigued out by regular online and Cape print columnists who no longer have anything to write about. It seems today’s columnists are so lazy they can’t even stretch their imaginations and find it within themselves to write creatively or about something other than what we all know and saw last night. All I see in nowaday columns is news commentary. A boy slashes people – it’s adapted to a column. A new law is passed – it becomes a column. A man bites dog in the headlines – it’s definitely going to the columnist adaptors room. You see the trend? It’s highly boring and reeks of a dearth of creativity.

It’s probably the easiest thing to write about for any columnist. I could easily write or satirize Essop Pahad’s latest remarks on white people's 2010 pessimism or even muse on the non-medal-churning SA Olympic team or muse about that Krugersdorp ninja kid (God bless his soul and may he soon learn that things like Satanism or whatever are just opium of the masses – if that kid was raised an atheist none of that nonsense would have prevailed). You see there I go giving commentary to a news piece.

But the problem does not solely lie there – you see the more and more columnists revert to commenting on headline pieces day-in and day-out the more and more the news value is ‘benignarized’ – the story loses whatever grasp or integrity it had over its consumers or witnesses (I’m sorry I don’t know what readers are called these days, since they too are actively participating in the content-buliding and to a large extent determine how the writer will spew his venom). This in my terms would be a kind of devaluation of newsworthy items – where columnists exacerbate hot-off the press pieces and write them to get some response from the ‘reader’- laughter, anger or whatever. But that just kills the story and desensitizes people to the actual story as they become authors and participants in the news making process together with their lazy columnists.

Anyway. Feels good to be back in the Cape. Tom Eaton - please come back from the screen-writing business you're into these days - at first we thought you were joking and would come back. We only have Bongani Madondo - who I suspect writes whenever he feels like it and not weekly.