Robert Kirby CHANNELVISION
It has been fascinating to watch the recent and sometimes desperate damage control undertaken by the SABC, especially with regard to the Durban Aids 2000 conference. Not that the manipulation of public comprehension is anything new at the SABC. They’ve been doing it for as long as anyone can remember. In the heydays of people like Pete Meyer every SABC board meeting was preceded by a meeting of the top Broederbond executive, so that the board members knew exactly which way to make the Corporation think. The use of the SABC as a government apologist is one of the “legacies of apartheid” no one seems at all keen to be rid of. The aberrant position on HIV/ Aids favoured by the government and its leader was given the softest of touches by the SABC. How else do you explain away bunchbrain SABC lines like: “Mr Mbeki’s courageous views on the real causes of Aids have created a ripple in the scientific community”? Some ripple.
Every time you looked at the box they were patching with little plasters, splints, ointments and bandages, not least in some hefty local anaesthetics in the form of interviews with those scientific protagonists who could be relied on not to rock the presidential barge. In this way the entire Aids-conference exercise was “spun” so that its prime purpose – the exchange and debate of scientific fact and intention – was distorted, presented as an extended political squabble. Talk about priorities.
In some ways this was summed up by Mr Nelson Mandela when he appealed for an elevation above personal and political levels of practical reactions to the Aids crisis. But when he climbed the rostrum to do some really crucial repair work, it was already too late. The opportunity had been wasted. They should have had him at the beginning, instead of the ridiculous R5- million kickoff extravaganza. So far the SABC, for all its intentions, has yet to provide a summary of what was and was not achieved at the conference. It’s still coming at us in fragments: a short reference here, a sound bite there. Most of all it has lacked in what is clearly a perfect opportunity to put the health mandarins on the chopping block and demand to know what they are going to do about the thing. Talk about sore losers. The failure of the 2006 soccer World Cup bid has been getting the opposite of damage control. Here everyone seems eager to break as many limbs and bash in as many heads as possible. In fact the only dignified response has been by Danny Jordaan, the one who had most reason to complain but who chose, instead, to bow gracefully to the Fifa decision. Most amusing was to hear Barney Pityana explaining how the failure was evidence of a mutant form of racism. Barney was being interviewed on SABC2’s Newsmaker about the Human Rights Commission’s spring collection of racism conferences. Floating seductively across the provincial ramps will be about 10 of these expensive discourses, dealing with pivotal issues like racism in supermarket queues, racism in sunshine apportionment, racism in tyre pressures, racism in traditional circumcision ceremonies and many more. Barney was being gently grilled by the ubiquitous Vuyo Mbuli, who becomes more urbane by the week. The only trouble with Vuyo is that, like many others, he is clinically incapable of assembling a sentence without including the now meaningless conjunctive phrase: “in terms of …” The questions flow smoothly out of Vuyo. “In terms of racism as seen in terms of ethnicity, how would this affect people in terms of their cultural identities and, of course, in terms of their environment?” Here are a few others you might try, Vuyo: “with regard to …”; “as seen against …”; “in the light of …”; “as opposed to …”; “always mindful of …”; “when all is said and done …”; and “seeing one against the other …”. It’s called bureauspeak and it contains screeds of other important- sounding phrases. Don’t confine yourself to just the one. Good news for birders, both dedicated and occasional, is the current series on M-Net at 5pm on Sunday afternoons, David Attenborough’s acclaimed The Life of Birds. If you haven’t latched on yet, you’ve only missed three of the series; fascinating, beautifully filmed and presented with Attenborough’s extraordinary affection for his subjects. It is hard to imagine how much patient fieldwork must go into programmes like these. Literally thousands of hours of waiting for the chance to capture the magic moment in wilderness life. Don’t miss this series.