Should Press Boss fall on his sword?

Dear Mondli Mkhanya, off-the-ball, Editor-in-Chief of Avusa’s Newspapers,

        Oh no Mondli, one of your guys has done it again. Your Group (Sunday Times, Sowetan, Sunday World etc) can’t trust its columnists as far as it can fire them.

          Talk about dereliction of duty. Where are the editors when your papers get published? And what’s even more important, where have you been as the overall editorial boss for your entire Group?

          One after another we have had your columnists writing what you yourself considered to be unacceptable, racially charged statements that have outraged all and sundry. Nobody, least of all you or your Editors know what they are going to put into print next.

          And all this has happened on your watch.

          In 2008 you were the Editor of the Sunday Times when you fired David Bullard for insulting Blacks in his Out to Lunch column which he had been writing for years. You apologised saying, We were complicit in disseminating his Stone Age philosophies.

        You were subsequently promoted to your present position and low and behold the Stone Age philosophies kept being expounded by two different columnists who also got their marching orders.

          The first of these was Black, Kuli Roberts at the Sunday World who got stuck into South Africa’s Coloured population, most of whom live in the Western Cape, for all manner of sins from being very violent (as if Blacks are not) and breeding like rabbits.

          Did she take her queue from you, I have always wondered? I say this because shortly before her unacceptable piece your regular Sunday Times column was all about how Blacks were ostracised in the Western Cape. You proposed action, presumably by the Black Government, to solve this. The inference was that the Coloureds should be forced to change their attitude towards Blacks. 

When Kuli’s column, Bitches Brew was axed you came out with this pious statement, Avusa Media will not allow any of its titles to disseminate prejudicial commentary that reinforces divisions and entrenches racial stereotypes. It was a particular gem considering that you had previous allowed Bullard’s divisive, racial remarks to slip through.

          The most recent scandal involved Eric Miyeni. In the Sowetan, as you know, he slammed Ferial Haffajee, the Coloured editor of City Press, owned by your opposition, the predominately White, Naspers Group. He accused her of being a Black snake in the grass employed by White capitalists to sow discord among Blacks who would have had a burning tyre put round her neck in the 1980s.

         They are quite capably of organising their own discord if you ask me, without any help from Haffagee. But that’s another story.

         You continued to be unaware that Stone Age philosophies were still thriving right under your nose until they once again hit the fan.

Miyeni felt that his kind of racial slander was appropriate because the City Press had exposed Julius Malema, the Black  President of the Youth Wing of the ruling African National Congress and well known shit stirrer. The paper claimed that Malema, who professes to champion the plight of the poor, had a suspect trust to fund his lavish lifestyle.

          I see that after he was sacked Miyeni hit back by claiming you and your Editors were not doing their job by letting his kind of outbursts get into print and then firing the authors afterwards.

How right he is Mondli.

Your act of revenge was to make him the Mampara (fool) of the Week in the Sunday Times. But one has to ask, what does that make you?

         The acting editor of the Sowetan, Len Maseko must be commended for being extremely honourable by taking responsibility for Miyeni’s lapse and resigning. And what makes his decision even more honourable was that he was on leave when the column appeared.

          So don’t you think Mondli that you should follow his excellent example, especially as you didn’t have the I was on holiday excuse when this happen, not once, not twice, but three times while you were in charge.

        I know it’s not part of African culture, but do the right thing Mondli, fall on your sword.

          Always watchfully yours,

          Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman. 

P.S. I’m a former Sunday Times columnist who wasn’t fired, but perhaps it will now be done retrospectively. 

Buy my book 'Wherer have all the children gone?' on Amazon.com  It's thriller with an underlying love story that defied generations of prejudice.

Cape Town -unfriendliest City in the Universe

Dear newspaper columnist Mondli Makhanya,

          If Sir Francis Drake, the first Englishman to sail around the world in 15 something or other didn’t say it he should have.The Cape is the most unfriendliest Cape in all Christendom.

          Not long ago Mondli, as the Black Editor in Chief of the Group that controls South Africa’s Sunday Times, you devoted your usual column in that paper to what you described as black discomfort in Cape Town.

          You gave as an example Black businessmen who came to work in the City only to move on soon afterwards because of loneliness and social discomfort.

          You made out that this was purely due to the fact that the Whites there didn’t like Blacks. You described that City as being the "most racially polarised of South Africa’s major centers.
          "It is often discussed with great emotion by Blacks and steadfastly rebutted by mainly White Capetonians,"  you claimed. 

          Sorry Mondli it’s not as simple as that. You Blacks have such a chip on your shoulders that you seem to think that whenever you have a problem with Whites it’s automatically a racial thing.         
          There is certainly a problem with Whites in Cape Town but it's not what you think it is.

          The dyed-in-the-wool Capetonians take pride in treating outsiders of every colour with an indifference that borders on hostility. Their fellow Whites take the brunt of this approach because they are the people they are most likely to come in contact with socially.

        You see they will only really accept you if you were born there otherwise it takes 50 years of hard labour to become one of them. During that time they will happily come to your home ad nauseam for dinners and the like, but you’ll never be invited back.

          And what you must certainly never do is call round at the home of one of them uninvited. That is an unforgivable sin.

          Even the numerous churches haven’t been able to make a dent in this peculiar White culture that depends so much on having gone to the right school and that sort of thing.

          A long time ago when the country was under White domination my brother-in-law, who was based in Johannesburg, was briefly seconded to Cape Town by the bank that employed him. In those apartheid days he would only have been working with Whites. But in the six months that he was there living in a hotel not one of his colleagues asked him to their home for as much as a cup of tea.

          After three years of living in Cape Town the nearest my wife and I have got to being welcomed into a White home in our suburb was when a four year old girl my wife spoke to in the street invited my wife to her party.

          An equally bad indictment of the City’ indigenous Whities was the conversation my wife had with a woman who is married to a local. She revealed that she was Polish and added sadly, "In Cape Town I’ll always be a  foreigner."

          I could go on and on with similar stories. Walking on an almost deserted beach my wife and I approached a grey haired woman with her grown up daughter. When I greeted the older woman she looked at me with a puzzled expression as if she was thinking, I don’t know you.

          So I said, "I know it’s not done in Cape Town to greet people you don’t know, but I’m doing it anyway." She replied, "Yes, I’m afraid us Capetonians are a stuffy lot."

         So there you are Mondli South 
Africa’s problems are not always just in Black and White.

          Probably since Drake’s time the Whites in Cape Town have been a closed order aptly summed up by this little ditty about two old Cape families.

        The Cape, the land of the grape and the cod,

       Where the Cloetes speak only to the Van der Byls

       And the Van der Byls only to God.        

          Shamefully yours,

          Jon.

P.S. I’m a White, who went to school in Cape Town, but who lost his White, Capetonian nationality because I was a traitor to the cause by living away from the City for too long.

Racial insults pass sleeping editors

Dear Mondli Makhanya, Big Shot Editor and Sunday Times Columinist,

          Don’t you ever learn at the Avusa Group of newspapers (Sunday Times, The Times, Sowetan, Sunday World etc)? Columnists are by nature controversial so editors shouldn’t blindly trust them to do the right thing.

          Before columns are printed the editor or one of his deputies should read them to make sure that they have not over stepped the mark. But this doesn’t seem to be the norm at Avusa and as a result you keep putting your foot in racial quicksand and ending up floundering around with pathetic excuses.

          Three years ago that whitey, David Bullard got his marching orders from the Sunday Times. His crime was that he insulted Blacks in his Out to Lunch column.

          Mondli you were the Black editor of the paper at the time and you apologised saying, We were complicit in disseminating his Stone Age philosophies.  

        As you know your paper is big on investigations so how come he was writing for you for 14 years before you found that out?

          Well if you don’t mind me saying so Mondli you still have Stone Age editing on the papers in your group

          Nothing has changed since that 2008 boo boo even though you have moved up the ranks to become the Big Chief Editor of your entire Group.

          This time it was Kuli Roberts, a Black columnist, on the Sunday World who let her prejudices get the better of her without her Editor, Wally Mbhele, noticing until the Twitter hit the fan.

          She accused our Coloured population of all manner of diabolical behaviour. From being nuts; very violent as if Blacks are not; breeding like rabbits and having girls who are more obsessed with naai majiene than any other race. In other words sure bet, shaggers.

          If the African National Congress controlled Government is hoping to regain the Western Cape which is essentially Coloured, in the coming Municipal Elections, the oppositon Democratic Alliance must only wish that Kuli was still an ANC spokesman there?

          According to The Times, Wally awoke at the Sunday World with this inane gem, Though I recognise the right of columnists to express their opinions without fear or favour, these should not amount to prejudice.

          Have you ever read a column that hasn’t got an element of prejudice in it?

          Her’s, appropriately called Bitch’s Brew, was promptly axed.

       So much for those well worn, press clichés without fear or favour or publish and be damned.

          The aptly named Wally apologised and you added, Avusa Media will not allow any of its titles to disseminate prejudicial commentary that reinforces divisions and entrenches racial stereotypes.

          You’re a fine one to talk. Only a few weeks earlier your regular column in the Sunday Times was headed Healing its racial scars remains the Western Cape’s biggest problem.

          It was all about how Blacks felt out of place in Cape Town and that the racial discord in that part of the country requires action before it becomes a destructive wave. You didn’t say what action, but how about sending some Zulu Impis down to teach the Coloured Capies how to behave.

          The fact that you got the wrong end of the stick completely is something I will deal with at another time.

          The Western Cape, you said, remains out of step with South Africa’s march towards a non-racial society. What March? The Government for a start is making sure it doesn't go anywhere.

          Not half as out of step as your newspapers where the editors are snoozing while columnists have a field day with their racial prejudices.

          Did Kuli perhaps get the idea of knocking the Coloureds from that column of yours?  Could it have been a case of follow my leader with Kuli trying to impress by making it a lot more vicious this time?

          I see the statement your Group issued admitted that Kuli’s attack on the Coloureds was a clear violation of the South African Press Code and Avusa’s Media’s internal codes.

          I don’t know about the Press Code, but as I have often pointed out on my blog, newspapers in your Group don’t take much notice of your own internal codes and this is just another much more disturbing example of that.

          Can you tell me this? Will Kuli get fired by all the papers in your Group in the same way that Bullard got dismissed or will her Blackness save her?

          She has quite a media pedigree. She is or was Deputy Editor of the Sunday World; presents SABC’s TV reality show What not to wear and she also writes a social column in The Times. Could this also make her too big to boot?

          I suggest you warn Kuli, as she doesn’t seem to know much about these things, that if she ever writes another column she should never refer to an Indian as Kuli. It’s too close for comfort.

          Yours respectfully,

          Jon, former Sunday Times columnist in the days when Editors were not asleep at their desks.

PS. Watch out for Morals of Newspaper Columnists on my Blog.

Papers that break their own Code of Conduct - continuously

Dear Prakash Desai, Avusa Group’s Chief Executive,

          Did you know that the editors on some of your Group’s newspapers like The Times and the Sunday Times don’t seem to be familiar with that well known saying, People in flimsy papers shouldn’t throw stones?

          I’ve just read the editorial in The Times. Under the heading JZ’s breach of ethics returns to bite him. It lambastes President Zuma for not naming members of his cabinet who violated Parliament’s, Executive Ethics Code by not declaring their financial interests in the stipulated time. He had also been an offender.

        Not unlike Zuma your papers consistently flout your own Group’s Code of Conduct.  How can they set themselves up as moral guardians when their own moral are so lax? 

          Like Zuma their breaches of ethics are coming back to bite them right on their smug, holier than thou, you know what. Once again they’ve been caught on my blog with their pants down.

          As the members of the South African Press Council sit idly by while this is going on it is left to me, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman to spotlight these things.

       What’s the point Prakash in your Group declaring that its papers do not accept anything for free when The Times and the Sunday Times go on doing it?

          In the same edition that Zuma was taken to task The Times carried a glowing story by Jackie May about a tented camp at the Madikwe Game Reserve where rates start at R3100 per person sharing per night. It ended with this in italics; May was a guest of the Thakadu River Camp.

          This was nothing but a free advertisement in disguised. There’s no chance of readers getting a critical assessment of these places when the reporter has been enticed there as a guest.

          A few days earlier the Travel & Food section of the Sunday Times carried a report by Paul Ash on the opening of Club Med’s new resort at Sinai in Egypt. It too ended by telling readers that he had been a guest of the main subject of his report.

          Sinai, he wrote, was the site of the original wandering when Moses led the Jews out of Egypt. An 11^th Commandment might be; Don’t go into a desert canyon wearing strappy sandals. 

          More appropriately I would say the 11th one should be: Don’t go on free trips when they are contrary to your paper’s Code of Conduct.

          A headline in the Review section of that Sunday Times was just as ironical as the editorial about Zuma. It was above the column written by Mondli Makhanya, the overall big shot editor of your entire Group. It said, Demands for ‘free stuff’ are damaging our future as a nation.

          It had nothing to do with your papers getting freebies but it was extremely apt nevertheless.

        I first exposed how your papers were ignoring your Code of Conduct in a letter to Phylicia Oppelt, the Editor of The Times, which appeared on my blog headed: What Code of Conduct.

          Afterwards Thabo Leshilo, your Group Public Editor who is charged with dealing with complaints commented, It does a good job of keeping us on our toes.

          
          Well it seems that even on their toes the editors of these two publications are unable to reach the high standards set by your Code of Conduct because even after my first blog on the subject the freebies kept on being accepted. 

          Whoever formulated your Code of Conduct evidently thought freebies could taint the reports that appeared in your papers and that’s why they were banned.

          So why does nobody stop the practice especially when the evidence is so blatantly displayed in print?

          Yours tenaciously,

          Jon, the ever watchful Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman.

Buy my book 'Where have all the children gone?' on Amazon Kindle  It's a thriller with an underlying love story that defied generations of prejudice.

What code of Conduct

Dear Phylicia Oppelt, Editor of The Times,
             I said to my wife today that your paper is a great read now and she replied, It’s probably because its run by a woman. As I’m not a chauvinistic pig I have to reluctantly agree that my wife may possibly be right. But it’s a big may though? And if she is right it will be the first time this century.
          But while your paper could be the bargain of the decade at R2 and a five day a week freebie for Sunday Times subscribers, it’s an aspect of freebies that does concern me as the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman.
           I look out for things that are too piffling for the South African Press Ombudsman, Joe Thloloe to worry about. Although with the ANC breathing down your necks threatening all kinds of terrible things against the Press I would have thought Joe would be looking out for transgressions everywhere so I wouldn’t have to do it.
          The other day virtually the entire page was taken up with a glowing puff about the Marlin Lodge in Mozambique’s Benguerra Island and Federal Airlines.
          It was written by Shanthini Naidoo, your deputy features editor of this Avusa Group paper. And it began There are a few good reasons to blow the budget. One of them, for a recently-wed like me, is to relive your honeymoon. The Lodge has 17 suites with rates starting from R3 000 per person sharing. Not the kind of place the Poor Man’s Ombudsman can afford to stay in unless he got a job with you guys.
          That was in October and the article concluded with this rider Naidoo was a guest of Mantis Collections’ Marlin Lodge and Federal Airlines.
          Then in late November it was Andrea Nagel’s turn to languish in luxury so she could report on the Lions Sands game reserve in your BLOW THE BUDGET section. That’s some place by the sound of it. This private game reserve bordering the Kruger Park is the haunt, Nagel told us, of the very rich and famous. People like George Michael, Microsoft’s co-founder, Paul Allen and singer Vanessa Williams are just some of the names she dropped.
          Surprise, surprise people also go there to see wild animals, like the Big Five.
          The most romantic feature Nagel revealed was the private bush tree house at the top of a majestic 500-year-old Leadwood tree open on all sides to the plains and the wild animals that inhabit them. And though every moment of my weekend at Lions Sands was memorable, I’ll make sure that next time I sign up for the tree-house experience. Oh! and there will be a next time.  Even on a journalist’s miserable salary?

·       Nagel was a guest of Lions Sands we were told at the bottom.

          And in the sports section a week or so later a report on the Springboks’ tour of Britain by the rugby writer had a similar thought provoker. Simnikiwe Xabanisa is on the Springboks Grand Slam tour courtesy of British Airways.
           As the headline on Nagel’s article said, There’s no beating about the bush, so I won’t either. Does this mean Phylicia that The Times paid for these trips or did the journalists get them free?
            Avusa’s code of conduct you will recall proudly proclaims: We do not accept anything for free. We pay our way. We do not accept gifts, freebies, inducements, special offer tickets and so on that are not available to us as ordinary citizens.
          Well I’m an ordinary citizen, very ordinary my ex-wife would no doubt have told you, and I haven’t received an invite lately from Mala Mala game reserve (Approximately R4 000 to R6 000 a night sharing although they only talk in US dollars). And nor has South Africa Airways got around to inviting my wife and I to be their guests on a flight to Australia when they know perfectly well we have a daughter there.
          If these were free trips your paper was talking about, what’s the point in being so coy about them with these bits in italics at the end? Regarding the rugby one, is the rider the pay back advert for British Airways and in the case of the Naidoo and Nagel articles was it to tell us that, in the circumstances, we could hardly expect a critical assessment of the places where they stayed or the airline mentioned?

          EINA! In the Sunday Times of November 28 a prominent column on Page 4 ended with another of these what’s-going-on riders. It said, Makhanya visited Argentina courtesy of that country’s South African embassy.
          Did that mean us tax payers paid? If so nobody asked for my permission. Or was it the Argentinians who had the pleasure?
          You know who this is? It’s none other than Mondli Makhanya, former Editor in Chief of the Sunday Times and now the big shot of them all, the Editor in Chief of Avusa Media’s entire newspaper empire.
          What’s that the Press is always telling us; If you’re in the public eye don’t make a spectacle of yourself.
          Yours watchfully,
          Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman.

Buy my book 'Where have all the children gone?' on Amazon.com  It's a thriller with an underlying love story that defied generations of prejudice.