Channel vision
As we see increasingly often, there’s nothing the SABC television news department enjoys better than leering at someone else’s misfortune. All those loving examinations of dead bodies hanging out of taxis, weeping mothers, body bags, blood- stained teddy bears.
Last Sunday evening though, SABC television news excelled its meanest receipts in a sordid little piece on child pornography, put together by Mr Richard Newton, he of the SABC’s Bloemfontein newsroom. Known principally for his frequent public struggles with basic English grammar and pronunciation, Newton outdid even his magnificently nominal talents in this one.
The justification for the piece was, of course, altruistic. The South African police have yet to do anything at all about the child pornography freely available on the Internet. In response to enquiries about their bland indifference, the police bosses have said that they cannot do anything until they receive complaints. Those directly involved in the distribution of child pornography, the Internet servers – principally Telkom – all gloomily shook their heads sadly and said they didn’t know it was happening.
So far so good in the item. What was inexcusable was the inclusion of samples of child pornography, the “offensive” bits doctored with little red squares.
The argument will no doubt be forwarded that shock tactics are betimes necessary to jolt everyone out of a general complacency. That obligation goes hand in hand with another trusty chestnut, “the public’s right to know” – the threadbare justification used by sleaze editors for publishing parliamentary lavatory confessions or photographs of a topless Lady Di.
Only recently, the SABC loudly proclaimed that it is “a true public broadcaster with the interests of the entire population at its heart”. What therefore is at issue is whether such an organisation should be pumping child-porn – however “cleaned up” it may be – into millions of homes. Adults who seek salacious material may buy it in shops – there is a choice involved. Abolishing that choice by including pornographic material in a national news broadcast is, to put it mildly, irresponsible and mucky. Add to that the fact that at 8.20pm quite a few children are still watching television. Then it becomes criminal.
Would the SABC accept for transmission a television advertisement for, say, Hustler magazine in which naked women lay back with wide-open legs, their genitals and nipples blanked out by pasted-on red squares?
Of course not. How then does the SABC justify the transmission of exactly the same posed photograph of a little girl? Does the corporation believe, so long as the eyes are blanked out, it’s quite okay to broadcast a photograph of an adult mounting a child? Another showstopper in Mr Newton’s grimy little essay?
No amount of distorted moral posturing will excuse the hideously tabloid nature of the item. Broadcasting the photographs was as, if not more depraved an act of pornography as the originals – no more acceptable than the hissing fallacies we have heard before from those in the SABC’s news department who hold that the gutter is its own alibi. Remember that graphic footage of the kangaroo court flogging of some teenagers? At three in the morning and which fascinating crime took place just as a fully-equipped SABC camera crew happened to be passing by. It’s called the luck of the whore.
Some brighter thoughts to close. Should you feel your Sabbaths are getting a little dull, don’t wait around for the evening’s telly entertainment. Tune in, like I did, to SABC2’s thrilling Newsmaker show – 11.30 am on the dot. Last Sunday had Snuki Zikalala demonstrating just how far you can slick yourself along a grovel road on a few cans of PhD (Bulgaria) lubricant.
Snuki’s merciless foot-licking of our beloved Mumsy Winnie (sporting a pair of gem-encrusted fashion spectacles she surely must have borrowed from Dame Edna Everage) was laugh-a-minute stuff. Even funnier was to come when Snuki sank his unrelenting gums in Sam “Motorcade” Nujoma. Whatever you do, don’t miss this show.
The Million Dollar golf tournament was, as usual, good stuff. I’ve never believed Willem van Drimmellen actually exists. His commentaries sound computer-generated, like those complicated cellphone messages. Surprisingly in last week’s golf, Willem put my theory to waste when he suddenly came up with some deeply cultural lyricism: he described Ernie Els’s golf swing as having “all the rhythm of a Mozart symphony”.
This, of course, is utter rubbish. It’s much more like one of the violin sonatas.