Dear Readers,
Mathatha Tsedu |
My posts The Citizen’s Aladdin’s Cave of unbelievable
adverts; Ridiculous Advertising Standards Authority;
Print & Digital Media’s appalling hypocrisy and Caxton Bosses duck
dubious advertising issue didn’t
make the owners of the paper blush even slightly.
So I took the advice of Ingrid Louw the CEO of the Print & Digital Media SA (PDMSA).
This has as its members all South
Africa ’s major newspaper publishers
including Caxton, the owners of The Citizen.
As these decisions on what content to included or not to include is taken by editors, she told me, I suggest that a discussion be held with the South African Editors Forum who could address it as a strategic industry imperative.
SANEF is a voluntary forum of editors, senior
journalists and journalism educators from
all areas of the media industry in South Africa .
Its current director is Mathatha Tsedu
a journalist of considerable standing who was SANEF’s Chairman in 2010. He was recently seconded to this position
by his employers Media24 which is part of Naspers the country’s biggest media
empire. There he headed its Journalism
Academy .
He has a very impressive CV. Last year he was awarded Media24’s All Time Legend Award. He has won a host of other awards including the Nat Nakasa one for courageous journalism. A Nieman fellow he is a former editor of City Press and the Sunday Times and he was also the deputy editor of both The Star and the Sunday Independent.
He was fired as the editor of the
Sunday Times after less than a year because Johnnic Com munications,
the owners at the time, accused him of not sticking to his contract with the
result that the paper lost circulation and consequently revenue.
His version was that the management and
staff had not supported his efforts to Africanise the paper, which was denied
by the owners.
So
as som ebody who was prepared to put
his job on the line for the African cause I thought he was the ideal person to
back my crusade to get rid of these adverts that are designed to rip off less
sophisticated Africans.
Attached
to my email was a letter in which I gave him the history of my campaign with
links to all the posts and I said that it was Louw’s idea that I contact SANEF.
I mentioned that on its website SANEF claimed to have ideals similar to
all the organisations that I had so far contacted.
This is how my email continued:
It says
that ‘SANEF
is founded on high ideals in an industry that
around the world is often maligned for its lack of integrity.’
This is understandably when
you have papers like The Citizen
that is quite happy to publish fiction for profit with nobody in the industry
prepared to do a thing about it.
Your
website goes on to tell us under a Vision heading
that you aim to ‘prom ote
quality and ethics in journalism’.
Some Commitment??? |
Well it certainly can’t be in the public
interest for any newspaper to carry advertisements that are clearly not true
and are designed to rip off people particularly the less sophisticated and
poorer sections of our community.
It remains to be seen now if SANEF will live up
to the ideals it sets and be ACCOUNTABLE.
What follows is the sad story of my email
conversation with this legend of the profession.
10 June: This, my first email with my letter attached, was mistakenly addressed
to a previous SANEF director but
sent to the address director@sanef.org.za I said: Hopefully your organisation
will do what no other one has been prepared to do so far. And that is to take a
stand against newspapers that carry extremely dubious ads. When I
got no reply I phoned SANEF and the
lady who answered alerted me to my mistake and told me that Tsedu was
now the director and he would still have got my email.
13 June: In this email which was addressed to Tsedu I
referred to my mistake and said that my previous one had probably been given to
him, but just in case it hadn’t I was attaching the letter as if it was
addressed to him. I ended with, Please let me know what you
decide.
17 June: I
would be much obliged if you could reply, I asked.
I RECEIVED A ‘READ
REPORT’ FOR ALL MY EMAILS.
It was like trying to get a
reply from Caxton’s top executives
all over again.
When I still got no reply I phoned Tsedu’s
office several times but he was not in. I finally managed to speak to him on 18 June. And this is how the conversation went.
Jon: Are you going to answer my email?
Tsedu: At som e
point.
Jon: When will that be?
Tsedu: When we are finished with what we are
dealing with.
Jon: What are your immediate impressions?
Tsedu: I haven’t looked at the attachment, your
link.
I am not holding my breath waiting for a
reply as I don’t expect to get one.
But I do have this observation and you
readers may or may not agree with me.
I am sure you will agree that if you
started speaking to me while you were standing in front of me and I com pletely ignored you I would be regarded as being very
rude.
Well my belief is that not acknowledging
an mail when the sender knows you have received it is the technological
equivalent of this.
Regards,
Jon,
the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman and Consumer Watchdog, who does his best to
right the wrongs that the establish Media is happy to go along with.
P.S. Before posting this I sent it to Tsedu and invited him to correct any factual errors
and to make any com ments he
wished. I GOT NO REPLY.
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