» Further thoughts on eTV

Further thoughts on eTV

January 18th, 2010

On the eTV controversy, I think there are two separate questions to ask and answer: was eTV wise to run this interview; and are the police wise to react so sternly?

I am not sure of the answer on the first issue, as it is not entirely clear to me that the public interest factor outweighed giving publicity to these thugs. I think this is something to think clearly about and eTV must show that these guys have the credibility to merit this kind of treatment and that they are not just glamourising some petty thugs.

A separate issue is whether the police are right to go after eTV, and this is an easier question to answer. They are wasting their time and effort and need to go after the criminals not the journalists. There is little to gain from such a confrontation with journalists and it is a distraction from the job at hand.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, TV

3 Comments Add your own

1. bon-pro | January 19th, 2010 at 7:21 pm

Prof,I’m just glad I can comment on this ‘v been waiting since Friday. Did u see the latest on Robert Gumede and the M&G? can you imagine the damage this have caused even the impact on the man’s image and all this due to improper reporting and the very thing “Protecting my sources’. Another Question, can we trust some of our journalist looking and media houses based on this and the interests they seem to harbor? eTV were well within their right to broadcast but to answer your question, this was not the wisest decision nor was it in the interest of nation building.

While we are busy trying to calm the waves of the Angolan incident, eTV broadcastst this story and I’m saddened by their exageration of the state of things as the voice over described as well as the exaggerated opening footage. We’ve hosted big events before including IRB world cup ‘95, Caf ‘96 the ICC crickect world cup 2003 plus the recent Confed cup and no major criminal activities affected these events. Why now?

How credible are eTV reporters, were the criminals even real or a way to discredit S.A or eTv stirring controversy to promote themself? Even worse assumption, to discredit S.A? Prof aqnd reader i’d like you to observe e-News reporting: Instead of playing the footage with the actual person speaking they voice over and not in away that challenges you and I to make our own coclusion as they’ve already cocluded on our behalf or influenced us viewers to a coclusion they’ve assumed.

e-News doesn’t report but comment on the happenings of our country and as always their commentry is biased if not partial.

Back to the question: Can this report be taken as genuine? Another retoric: “Was this in our interests as South Africans?
2. don | January 22nd, 2010 at 11:30 am

My only concern/question is: should journalists be covering such issues ahead of the 2010 worl cup? Is the media doing a disservice by publishing/broadcasting these kind of stories?
3. Wessel van Rensburg | January 24th, 2010 at 8:58 pm

Prof, I think there is a few more questions to be asked.

Why did Lucky Phungula commit suicide. He did not appear in the interviews and allegedly was the fixer. Why then did he feel the pressure?

In his suicide note it read: “Mpho Lakaje you put me in this mess,” Mpho Lakaje being the E.TV reporter. It is alleged they knew each other from school.

Where did the pressure on Lucky come from, the police? In which case the question has to be, how did the police find out about his name? Did E.TV leak it?

Or was it from the criminals themselves? In which case it seems that they had no confidence that ETV would protect their identity.

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Anton Harber: Media

Professor Anton Harber directs the Journalism and Media Studies Programme at Wits University. He is former editor of the Mail & Guardian.
Full bio

Daily newspaper sales, South Africa
(Ave sales Jul-Dec)
1960 - 681 053 (Population 17,3m)
1970 - 723 566 (22m)
1980 - 803 229 (27,5m)
1990 - 1 214 396 (35,2m)
2000 - 1 117 886 (44m)
2006 - 1 600 000 (47,3m)
2011 - 1 310 000 (49m)

(Sources: ABC and nationmaster.com)

“It was pure political theatre. The excited room was filled with government officials, government consultants, quasi-government agencies, politicians and pupils from government schools. As if on cue, the room rang with applause as one education victory after another was claimed. This was, after all, the annual drama in which the minister of basic education appears on stage to announce the Grade 12 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results …” - Educationist Jonathan Jansen, one of the few with the credibility to look critically at this “celebratory orgy of mediocrity”.

“The (Incwala) ceremony is cloaked in secrecy and marks the (Swaziland) king’s return to public life after a period of withdrawal and spiritual contemplation. Among its highlights is a symbolic demonstration by the king of his power and dominance in a process involving his penetration of a black bull … But last year’s selected bull, according to a recent account from a whistle-blowing Incwala initiate, objected strongly, and threw off Africa’s last absolute monarch.” - Some surprises in this (un-bylined) account of Swaziland politics in Southern African Report

“When the Great Zucchini arrived that Saturday morning, Don had no idea who he was. Frankly, he didn’t look like a great anything. He looked like a house painter, Don thought, with some justification. He wears no costume. He was in painter’s pants, a coffee-stained shirt and a two-day growth of beard. He toted his beat-up props in beat-up steamer trunks, with ripped faux leather and broken hinges hanging askew.” - A classic of magazine profiling, by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post.

Diepsloot (Jonathan Ball, 2011)

Diesploot: Of Frogs and Fractals, a public lecture at the University of Johannesburg, 4 August 2011

Troublemakers - The Best of South Africa’s Investigative Journalism (Jacana, 2101), edited by Anton Harber and Margaret Renn

Introduction - The Troublemakers: An account of the rise of a new wave of investigative journalism in South Africa.

What is Left Unsaid: Reporting the South African HIV Epidemic, edited by Kristin Palitza, Natalie Ridgard, Helen Struthers and Anton Harber (Fanele, 2010)