MAVERICK'S REBECCA DAVIS TELLS IT LIKE IT ISN'T

Dear Rebecca Davis,

         You didn’t half get your knickers in a twist over my Tweets attacking you for swearing on Twitter. The on-line paper the Daily Maverick that you write for then, somewhat surprisingly, gave you space to vent your anger with In defence of sweary women.

         In your haste to get into print you didn’t let the facts stand in the way of a good story. With the result that you got the wrong end of the stick completely.

         You huffed and puffed for something like 1000 words displaying the huge chip you seemed to have about being a woman. At the same time, like a child that had just been reprimanded for swearing, you used the phrase Fucking hell which was the subject of my complaint twice and finished with I’m fucking angry.

         Just to emphasise that nobody, least of all a man, was going to stop you swearing, you threw in horsehit four times as well as your show off boast that Profanity is part of my rhetorical armoury.

         For those readers who don’t keep up with Twitter’s swearing female journalists the background was this. Rebecca commented on the case of a teenage boy who had been convicted of killing his parents and his sister who he also raped.

         She Tweeted: So the accused raped his own sister? Fucking hell.

         I asked on Twitter if it was alright to use Fucking Hell in the stories that appear in the Daily Maverick.

         I gave a link to a previous post I had written entitled Can Swearing & Journalism mix . In it I took Carien du Plessis the senior political writer at City Press to task for using crap, fukkit, bullshit and pee in my paints in her Tweets.

         I argued that as a journalist she would not be allowed to use this kind of language in the stories she wrote for City Press. So as she was in the public eye she had a duty not to swear on social media as this would reflect badly on her paper.

         And Rebecca you had obviously read this post because you referred to it in your Maverick report as being badly written and that I only accused Du Plessis of using the word crap.

         I wasn’t even aware that ‘crap’ counted as a swearword, which shows how far beyond the pale I really am, you added.

        It also shows what a wrong impression you can give if you leave out a significant part of the story. To use your phrase this is extremely selective. 

         Also had you done a bit of research you would have found that Du Plessis ceased her vile Twitter language immediately after my post appeared. Did she have second thoughts or did her Editor Ferial Haffajee tell her to stop it. I don’t know so I’ll leave it to you to decide what this proves.

         Your paper seems to have one rule for its writers and another for people who comment on it. Those who comment are expected to abide by polite society everywhere so I would have expected that writers like you would be required to do the same.

         Evidently your Editor and founder Branko Brkic and I have very different ideas of polite society. My version certainly doesn’t include the use of words like fucking and horseshit.

         Your paper’s website tells us that anonymous comments are not acceptable as they do not breed thoughtful civilised debate. Real names make for a real community.

         So could you ask Branko why it was that among the comments on the bottom of your story there were people (I assume they were people) with names like Kate, LG, Bonb, Panther, Hilton and McKeon etc. You can’t get much more anonymous than that.

THE EDITOR

          My second question to him is this. If names are so important why didn’t you mention my name which is on my Twitter profile? Instead you described me as a stranger; one of the critics of my swearing and this same man.

         By inference you attributed this to me. It is my experience, however, that the same men who jump to rebuke me for swearing do not seem remotely disturbed by the swearing of my male counterparts, which suggests that their delicate sense of offence is extremely selective.

AN EXTRACT FROM MY ORIGINAL POST ON THIS SUBJECT
THAT SHOWED I WAS IN GOOD COMPANY DEPLORING THIS
KIND OF LANGUAGE ON TWITTER

         Well as you have not yet got the message Rebecca my criticism of your swearing had nothing to do with you being a woman. It was, as I have already mentioned, entirely due to the fact that you are a journalist. I would have said the same about any male journo who did what you did.

         From what I’ve seen so far the male scribes have more sense and don’t have to court publicity by soiling their own doorstep with swear words on Twitter.

         Having once been employed editing Oxford English Dictionaries I wouldn’t dispute your brag that you can legitimately lay claim to a rich and extensive vocabulary; a bounteous lexical storehouse stacked high and deep with sufficient entries to convey countless shades of meaning and nuances of emotion.

         A built in dictionary doesn’t necessarily make you a good journalist.

         You went on to say that I know loads of words. I know so many words that I know ‘horsehit’ is by no means my only option to express repugnance.       

         Yet like the little girl, sorry I better mention a boy as well, trying to get attention you chose swear words instead of any of the other more acceptable words in your head. So you had no logical excuse.

         As you rightly said The precise form the censor takes varies, but the essence is always the same. In choosing to swear on a public platform, you reveal yourself not to be a ‘lady’. You betray a fundamental lack of ‘class’. You expose a vocabulary so deficient that you lack non-sweary alternatives. You encourage observers to lose all respect for you.

         You said it Rebecca not me and whether you like it or not this is exactly how sweary birds are perceived by many people.

The key question is: Do newspapers that often expose the imperfections of others need columnists and reporters like this?

          Craig Bishop, who was probably unaware of the journalist aspect, gave an apt if not somewhat harsh summary of the situation in his comment on your report.

 This is not a feminist problem – it is a social problem, he wrote. Trying to paint swearing into a feminist corner, while not invalid, limits the total resources society can bring to bear upon the problem. Besides, swearing has been and always will be the refuge of the illiterate, the uneducated, the vilely narcissistic, and rightfully, people who have dropped a sledge hammer on their toe.

         As an aside I think a lot more women must be taking up DIY.  There’s an awful lot of foul-mouthed chicks out there. It doesn’t somehow make them equal to men. It makes them equal to the illiterate, uneducated and vilely narcissistic men they have been told they can be equal to.

         Why not be better?

         The first comment I got after my tiff with you referred to my Du Plessis post. It was an Anonymous one saying:  Fucking sexist crap, this.

         Obviously I don’t know who sent it but the wording has the same sort of ring to it as the Readers Comments Policy on the Maverick’s website that begins Don’t write stupid crap.

         That’s one of the problems with those many cowards who hide behind Anonymous tags. They leave so much to the imagination.

         Anyway enough of my cr..azy and fff…… fanciful ideas on how hacks should behave because we all know that practising what they preach is not one of their strong points.

         Regards,

         Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman, who exposes the embarrassing stuff about the Press that it would prefer to keep under wraps.

P.S. In the interest of fairness I would have liked to get a comment from your Editor before I posted this but I was unable to do this. Your paper’s website tells us that as the individuals on your paper are constantly running around to bring you amazing news and analysis we can be a little hard to reach. This proved to be true as far as I was concerned.

P.P.S. This seems far from ideal if you are in the news gathering business.

P.P.P.S. It seems this post did some good because the Maverick's Readers Policy was changed. Here is my Tweet about it on 25/9/2014.

BLOG THAT NOBODY READS

Dear Investors,

Kevin Pearman

         It’s nice to have an admirer. It’s not often that I get such praise. So I thought you might be interested in this very accurate assessment of my character.

         "I am amazed at the incongruity between your pompous self-righteous claim to show up the rouges that advertise scams in the papers contrasted with the fact that you feel justified in attempting to destroy the business that I have built up and one in which 450 people will be affected due to your feeble efforts  to make yourself  feel important? Anyhow, I have at least 98% of shareholders on my side and I have let them know that you are the one blocking our progress.

         What has caused you to become such a supercilious prick – a legend in his own lunchtime? Do you have a small penis? Were you not breast fed? Have you lived your life in the closet? Did the kids tease you at school, or all of the above?

         Look in the mirror and ask yourself, ‘What have I actually achieved in this life?’

         I can look in the mirror and see a face that is honest, has never hurt anyone and who has achieved 3 awards as an inventor contributing to this life. I created the It Makes Cents (to sell Cell C sim cards) that took off like a rocket and your interference (merely asking Cell C if the scheme had its approval) which destroyed the aspirations of 140 people plus blocked my attempts at raising money for my other project (N-Tyre Solutions). If it were not for people like me, mankind would still be rubbing sticks together to make a fire and your mother would have smothered you at birth.

       Your claims at being a ‘watchdog’ are laughable – no wonder nobody reads your pathetic blog you miserable cretin." 13/9/2013

       

PEARMAN'S N-TYRE OFFER

           This attack came from Kevin Pearman who claims to have perfected a truck tyre monitoring invention that he has been trying to get on the road for more than 12 years under the N-tyre Solutions name. To help him to do this he has been adverting in the Sunday Times and probably elsewhere for investors in both the N-Tyre business and other schemes he came up with to raise further money for his tyre project.

         I wrote two posts ("Cell C’s strange dealings with man of many promises" and "Big business turns on little man with ‘brilliant’ concept" big business) about his money making ventures. They were based on what he told me in emails.

         In fact the Cell C story was unsolicited. I knew nothing about it until he told me and gave me all the facts in emails that ran to many pages and included full details of his marketing agreement with Cell C as well as a photograph of himself to go with the story.

Cell C cancelled his contract after I asked the then CEO Alan Knott-Craig if this had the firm’s blessing – a question that might have been asked by anybody contemplating putting their money into a scheme in which Kevin claimed people could easily make an extra R800 000 per annum.

         At the time Kevin told me in an email that he believed it was me who stirred the pot with Cell C – no hard feelings if it was, because I am a positive thinker and believe that everything happens for the best.

         He followed this with another email saying that he had played completely open cards with me for some time and he had now found not one but two very interested and very big corporates to take N-Tyre under their umbrella.

         However what he needed from me was to remove the two posts I had written about him because his two potential benefactors would not go ahead unless the negativity of these articles was removed from the internet.

         But when I asked who the two were he refused to name them.

         I replied saying: Kevin I’m afraid your story doesn’t add up. If these companies have been put off by what is on my blog they must assume that what is there is true. If that is so they would hardly go into a deal with you if my posts were removed, because that would not suddenly correct what is wrong. How do I know they ever existed?

         At all times you knew I wanted information for my blog. What’s on my blog is based purely on things you told me. I didn’t make them up and as you are constantly asking members of the public to invest in your various schemes I believe it is important for them to know what the background is before they part with what possibly could be their life savings.

         You say you have not hurt anyone, but what happened to the investors in your hot pad (to relieved muscle pains) business and how long have the people who put money into N-tyre got to wait for a return?

Kevin's promise if you invested in the
Heat in a Click hotpad business he was promoting

         What concerns me Kevin is that N-tyre Solutions always seems to have something just around the corner that is going to make you and your shareholders the millions that you believe your invention is worth. But you never get round the corner.

         You go from one dud business (hot pads) to the next (Cell C marketing) trying to make the R2-million you say you still need to make N-tyre profitable. You have said things like, ‘There has never been a doubt about the vast income potential of the N-tyre system.’ Yet years go by and this never materialises. Doesn’t that cast a HUGE, BIG DOUBT on its potential?

         You were asking the public to invest in the hot pads and Cell C projects. No doubt you collected money from people and I wonder if they got their money back.

         I spoke to one of your N-tyre shareholders who invested R150 000 nine months ago and if that’s the kind of investment you received I can’t understand why your 450 investors have not provided more than enough money to get the thing off the ground. If they each invested just R50 000 that’s a hell of a lot of money.

         So what has happened to their money?

Another invitation to invest in N-tyre that appeared in the
Sunday Times in December 2010

         In your most recent N-tyre circular (Sent to me unsolicited in Jan 2013) you told us you sold your own assets and raised R233 700, which you put into the company. You also invested R81 000 made by your new company The World Loves a Winner. What was that doing? Wasn’t that the company involved in the Cell C marketing operation?

         You also promised 15% interest (Way above anything you can get from the banks) to existing shareholders prepared to put in more money. Where their interest is going to come from it is hard to imagine if you can’t even raise the money to get the N-tyre gold mine operational.

         At some stage of the Cell debacle you asked me if I would be taking your side and I replied that I would be reporting as objectively as possible and that’s still my point of view.

         Pearman answered saying he was not going to deal with all the points I raised as it will clearly make no difference save to say that some investors have only put in R1000.

         At about this time, by some strange coincidence I began getting mystery calls on my landline at around three in the morning.

         Then in early February this year I got an email from David Erlank. He claimed to be an N-tyre shareholder and he offered to give me the low down on the latest scam involving Kevin Cholwich. He was a crook I wrote about (See Noseweek exposes Dearjon Letter) who was also exposed on M-net’s Carte Blanche investigative TV programme.

         In exchange for this information Erlank wanted me to remove the two posts I had written about Pearman’s money making schemes.

         I ignored this email.

         Then two months later I had an email from Pearman. He has a very short memory because in spite of the broadside he had given me he was now asking me for another favour.

         He stated he had been informed by Erlank that he had contacted me about Cholwich and would I be so kind as to forward him this message? Erlank would have done so himself, unfortunately his computer was stolen.      

         Why would Pearman now want to get the exact email from me, when Erlank could surely remember the gist of what he sent me?

         As nobody reads my pathetic blog it’s pointless me asking: Any ideas readers?  Well it looks as though this question will have to remain as unanswered as the calls I have been getting in the middle of the night.

         On second thoughts I think I have the answered to those. When coincidences keep happening they tell their own story.

         The calls stopped for a while and then Pearman phoned me the other day and when I told him I was not interest in his proposals the calls started all over again.

         I will leave it to you to decide whether or not you should invest your money with Pearman and his N-Tyre Solutions or any of his other projects. He has never complained that there were any inaccuracies about the information I gave in the two posts I wrote.  

         Yours faithfully,

        Jon, the ‘laughable’ Consumer Watchdog who could well save a lot of people from putting their money on the wrong horse.

P.S. Francois Joubert at the Investors Club doesn't seem to think that N-tyre is worth investing in. He's the editor of the small-cap stock newsletter Red Hot Penny Shares & the Resource and Scarcity Report. Below this is a comment to him dated 20 Feb 2014

RACIALISM'S THE ANSWER AT TOP UNIVERSITY

Dear Would-be Students,

         Do you know the story of the vulture that went round in ever decreasing circles until it eventually disappeared….

         That’s the censored version I’m using for decorum’s sake and so as not to corrupt the youth.

         Anyway what I’m getting at is that South African universities have a bad case of the vulture syndrome epitomised by the University of Cape Town (UCT).

         There the race track is far from level for everyone. And what’s more disturbing is that its Vice-chancellor Dr Max Price is so proud of it.

         Periodically he hits the headlines with up dates on this latest brand of social engineering.

         When I first wrote about this subject it was Funny Ha! Ha! unless you happened to be a White, Indian or a not Black enough student trying to get into this renowned establishment of higher learning.

         Now it has graduated to Funny Absurd but not many people are laughing especially young Whites and their parents.

DR PRICE TRYING TO EXPLAIN HOW
RACIALISM WORKS

         The idea of the policy was to give Blacks an artificial leg up because they had been discriminated against in all walks of life by the previous White apartheid Government.

         At the time of my first post the Black African National Congress had been in power running down the country for 17 years. It pretended that it stood for a non racial society when it was lying through its sparkling white teeth by doing its utmost to promote Blacks at every opportunity, at the expense of other races, particularly Whites.

         Priceless Max was reveling in it. At the University’s Medical School for instance Whites and Indians were expected to get at least 80% in their university entrance exams to stand a remote chance of even being considered for admission.

         Blacks only needed a mere 60% to walk in.

        Being the right COLOUR gets you the highest marks of all.

         Now 20 years since White rule ceased Price is in the news again with an even more baffling version of the policy he claims has now been changed so it is no longer based on race.

Will this be any help to the Whites who have been discriminated against as a reprisal for what the Whites only Government did when they weren’t even born then?

         However the gobbledygook Price told Chris Barron in an interview for the Sunday Times showed how difficult he is finding it to justify the indefensible. The longer the interview went on the more Priceless Max looked like that vulture I mentioned in the beginning.

         I hope Chris won’t mind if I lift a few quotes from his excellent report just to show you what I meant when I said that policy had reached the Funny Absurd stage. Actually it’s a lot worse but as I never went to university I can’t think of any more suitable words to describe it.

         Here’s part of the interview with my comments in brackets.

Barron: Why are you going to such pains to pretend that you will no longer be selecting on a race basis?

Price: We’re saying that race remains important, but that we don’t have to use race classification to achieve demographic targets.

Barron: So the bottom line is that race will remain as much of a factor as it is under the existing policy.

Price: Race will, race classification will not. (It’s hard to imagine how a person who speaks this kind of Double Dutch can become a vice-chancellor at a university).

Barron: In effect you’ll be selecting on the basis of race rather than merit?

Price: No. If we have two students who have 70% and one of them, whether black or white comes from a disadvantaged background, then that student will get in (The odds of a White being more disadvantaged than a Black are remote so this changes nothing).

Barron: What about the case of a black student who is accepted for medical school with 70% whereas the white student with 90% is rejected?

Price: Let’s bring it closer to reality. Probably 77% would get in above a white student with 90% (That sounds so much fairer and you can’t get more Priceless than that).

Barron: Whose interests are served by that?

Price: If you had a white student with the same background (in other words poor) with 77%, that white student would also get in above a white student (well off) with 90%. The idea is to give disadvantaged students the same opportunity as advantaged students (How can opportunities be equalised by excluding someone with 90%? In any case Price wandered off the point by compared White with White instead of White with Black).

         Max concluded by saying If we were to take all our applicants in this year 2014 for medical and judge them only on the marks they’ve achieved, there would only be about five or 10 African students in a class of 200 (Yet he’s still waffling away trying to make us believe that the policy has changed when it’s still as Black as ever). 

         It’s a very poor reflection on South Africa that after 20 years of Black rule being Black is the most important qualification to enable anyone to become a doctor through UCT’s Medical School.

         This might be okay for somebody learning to throw the bones to become a witch doctor, but it’s scary when the qualified could be transplanting hearts and doing other major operations.

All the University is doing is perpetuating apartheid that was so abhorred by the entire world when the previous White Government was in power. Only now it’s the other way round and that makes it – perfectly alright.

So Black is still the most beautiful colour and the policy vulture will remain flying around in ever decreasing circles with the difference being it will – NEVER DISAPPEAR
        Harmonious mixing of people of all colours doesn't have much of a future when universities teach How to play the race card to win as part of their curriculum.

Regards,

Jon, a Consumer Watchdog and if you ask me I would say that Dr Price’s master race plan badly needs a transfusion of mixed blood.

P.S. Will any of us live to see the day when South Africa has matured sufficiently to treat us all on merit rather than on COLOUR?

P.P.S. Chris congratulations on your no holds barred interview and the many other admirable ones you have done over the years reminiscent of the BBC’s Hard Talk.

EDITORS' QUESTIONABLE ETHICS

Dear Readers,                                               

       

Mathatha Tsedu

  My campaign to get the Johannesburg based The Citizen newspaper to stop carrying adverts that even its own editor agrees are not believable led me to the South African National Editors Forum (SANEF).

         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 Communications, 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 somebody 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 ‘promote quality and ethics in journalism’.

        

Some Commitment???

And under your Values heading you claim to stand for ‘integrity, tolerance, accountability and the public interest.’

         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.

          JOURNALISM might not be a crime but what about some of the
ADVERTISING

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 some 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 completely 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 comments he wished.  I GOT NO REPLY.

CAXTON'S BOSSES DUCK DUBIOUS ADVERTISING ISSUE

 Dear Readers,

                                                                                                           

Paul Jenkins

         You may have noticed that I have been trying to get the Johannesburg based The Citizen newspaper to be responsible by ceasing to carrying unbelievable advertisements. They promise all kinds of miraculous health cures with medicine that does such things as enlarging your manhood. Then there are lucky wallets that make you rich over night and instant answers to just about all life’s problems.

         When my first post THE CITIZEN’S ALLADIN’S CAVE OF UNBELIEVABLE ADVERTS (Unbelievable ads) had no affect I tried South Africa’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

         This authority that is supposed to police advertising rejected my complaints out of hand even though it had previously ruled against similar advertising (Ridiculous ads).

         The ASA passed me on to the Print & Digital Media SA (PDMSA), an organisation of virtually all South Africa’s media owners that has the Caxton & CTP Group, the owners of The Citizen as one of its members.

         It too refused to take any action even though it claims to promote high standards and integrity within the print and digital media industries (Appalling hypocrisy).

         Next I tried to contact Terry Moolman, Caxton’s co-founder and CEO who is the controlling shareholder of a group that turns over R5-billion year. From the beginning that appeared even more hopeless than my other efforts.

A rare picture of TERRY MOOLMAN

         Dubbed The Invisible Media Baron he keeps such a low profile that when I phoned his flagship paper The Citizen and asked for him the girl on the switchboard had never heard of him. EHe heads an empire that consists of the daily newspaper The Citizen, plus numerous local newspapers as well as magazines and a massive printing section that not only produces the Group’s own publications but others as well.

         But even though he has this huge media business he apparently never gives interviews.

  

       The nearest I could get to The Invisible Man was to send an email to him via his PA. I asked why it was that the The Citizen continued to carry ads that even its editor agreed were not believable. I referred him to my post about this and pointed out that his Group’s Code of Ethics stated that the Group acts in an open and honest way in all its dealings and was socially responsible.

         The Code stipulated that all the managers and directors have a responsibility to ensure that this Code is adhered to at all times. I added that as his Group was a member of the PDMSA this also set certain standards of integrity.

         I told him that I did not believe that what The Citizen was doing complied with the PDMSA’s principles or his Group’s own Code of Ethics.

         In keeping with his Invisible Man reputation I got no reply from Moolman but his PA told me my email was passed to Paul Jenkins, who is described as the Group Chairman and Chairman of the Social and Ethics Committee.

         I gave it to him and he was going to respond, she told me. That was on 20 May 2014.

         After that I sent two more emails trying to get a reply. In my last one addressed to Jenkins and dated 26 May I asked, Can I now assume that you will not be commenting on my email?  And that you have nothing to say about The Citizen’s dubious advertising even though you appear to be in charge of ethics for the Caxton Group?

         A week has now elapsed since this email and it doesn’t look as though I will ever get a reply.

Caxton's Advertising Committee

         Could it be that there is more than one Invisible Man in the top echelons of the Caxton Group when it comes to the ethics of whether or not to continue making money out of advertising fiction in a newspaper?

         Yours sincerely,

         Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman and Consumer Watch Dog who can’t necessarily win them all, but he can certainly spotlight the things that are very wrong.