John Matshikiza
With The Lid Off
Far be it from me to be critical of the way other newspapers operate, but, speaking as a simple citizen for a moment, I have to say I get frustrated at the lack of proper background and follow-up in many of the stories we are fed. If you don’t know what happens in the end, and you don’t understand what’s going on anyway, what is the point of being told the story in the first place?
Look at this story, told in a famous Johannesburg daily called The Star on June 16:
“A 43-year-old New York woman, Jeane Lewis, is being charged with fraud in the Manhattan Supreme Court, because she bogusly got her union medical insurance fund to pick up the $15 000 tab for penal implant treatment for her lover. The claim was only discovered to be bogus because she had told the quack who administered the treatment that the beneficiary was her husband, a bona fide client of the medical fund. The husband was unsporting enough to open the medical aid bills when they hit the doormat some months later, and blew the whistle because he had no recollection of ever receiving the kind of implants described, and had never considered himself dysfunctional in the region in question anyway.
“Eventually it was discovered that the true recipient of this restorative treatment was a 44-year-old wetback from Haiti, one Andre Dovilas. Dovilas is also on trial for fraud, because he went along with the scam and signed himself on as the husband each time he went for the treatment.
“The hapless couple have pleaded not guilty to fraud and forgery (bluff it out is always the best policy) and the trial continues.”
Criticise me for being too literal-minded. The story was probably placed there by the editor as a piece of mild titillation (the kind of thing, I am proud to say, that would never happen at the Mail & Guardian) on a page dominated by stories of ongoing mayhem here at home – a road-rage murder perpetrated by a man who happened to have a hockey stick lying around in the back of his car when he was looking for a blunt object to kill another motorist with; a state bodyguard shooting dead a would-be hijacker; crisis after crisis in the national health system; and a six-year-old boy going missing at Zionist headquarters in Moria.
A headline that reads “Penis implant may end in long jail term” draws the embattled reader’s eye as welcome light relief, even though the story itself sounds less than a happy one for the people involved.
The point is when you decide to present the unsuspecting public with a story like that you must surely take responsibility for the questions that it raises, and cover all the angles. Not so. The reader is left alone to jump to his/her own erroneous conclusions.
I know all sorts of nonsense happens in New York, but this is one of the more nonsensical. The biggest question is about the nature of this infidelity. The nave reader probably goes around imagining that one takes a lover in order to get certain intimate attentions that you don’t feel you’re getting at home. In this case, it seems like there was nothing wrong with mechanical matters in the marital bed, but there was definitely something wrong with what the lover had to offer. Why not, then, just change the lover, or else stay at home and make good use of what’s there?
Could this, on the other hand, be a case of more noble forces at work? Was the “lover” actually loved because of his graceful and generous mind, rather than for any short- lived physical fireworks he was able to deliver in sweetly stolen moments? Sympathy immediately shifts to the unfaithful woman, escaping from the dulling environment of the virile but brainless brute she has married into the gentle arms of a Caribbean poet, who has everything going for him but that harmless little extra touch of spice that makes a candlelit evening perfect.
Thanks to the banal level of reporting, we shall probably never know. We shall also probably hear nothing more about the outcome of the case – the story was just another quickie in the corner, in newspaper terms, never to be heard from again. But it’s frustrating because you have already been drawn into the drama and want to know more about these extraordinary people and their bizarre battle against the ordinariness of their lives.
That is the problem with newspapers – they are there to turn intense experiences from real life into disposable sound bites. In the process of doing this, we hacks create a parallel world of intense experience in a drab and caffeine-fuelled newsroom, working ourselves up into a foam of deadline hysteria and thinking we are producing art. Tomorrow, or next week, everything is forgotten, and we are blithely carving out more column inches in virgin territory, never looking back.
Out there, the real people whose lives our spotlight briefly touched trudge on, famous for a couple of minutes and then forgotten. I suppose it’s one of the perils of modern living.