Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
It’s hard not to be cynical about the media response to the fatalities at Ellis Park last week. Print was bad enough, but South African television once again showed itself up as an institution almost completely devoid of dignity or restraint. I am sure that in the television newsrooms they hang a devil’s purse of sentimental clichs, cheap overstatement and gushy hyperbole, to be dipped into whenever deemed necessary by the editors.
It’s also hard to determine which was worse, e.tv or the SABC, as their reporters and newswriters luxuriated in melodramatic embellishment of anything they could lay their hands on. I’ll plump for the SABC if only because of an inclusion in a news bulletin of the following evening.
Now there’s nothing that stimulates the average SABC or e.tv cameraman more than getting close-ups of the grieving relatives of crime or calamity’s victims. But this time the SABC outdid even its own putrid norms. A man came out of a mortuary, his face in shocked grief. He had just identified his dead wife. Does the SABC acknowledge that vehement personal emotion of this kind is not material for its screens and that to film someone in a state such as this man’s is the grossest invasion of his privacy? Of course not. What the SABC did was to shove a camera in the man’s face for about a minute, as he whipped and writhed in his distress. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the SABC broadcast the thing.
What brute’s mentality prevails at the SABC news department, which sanctions, if not encourages, its repertoire of polluting journalism? It’s not that this was a one-off. The SABC and e.tv daily exhibit their pornotropic fascination with murder’s bloodstains and their lingering inspections of motor accidents. They are both of contaminated tabloid pedigree.
A hastily convened press conference on the Ellis Park disaster was held on the Thursday afternoon and transmitted live. Notwithstanding the technical fiasco of faulty microphones and sloppy direction, this gave us a front-row view of the hypocrisy behind all the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
About 10 administrators and politicians were lined up, not one of them missing this God-given opportunity to express his or her personal anguish. Underneath all the bale and sorrow it was easy to smell the bilge: they were actually there to get in some early and energetic passing of the buck. Despite its shrillness, the grief was entirely secondary to smug alibi.
Most bogus of the lot was soccer mandarin Robin Petersen, who took it upon himself to deliver an oily little sermon to the journalists, telling them to be suitable to the tragedy that’s when he wasn’t interrupting anyone daring to ask a penetrating question.
The catchphrase which was to adorn television screens and newspaper posters for the first few days was that reliable old standby: A Nation Mourns. Those who brandished it must be well out of touch. The predominant public emotion arising from the Ellis Park deaths was far less one of grief than of anger, of outrage that it had been allowed to happen.
The whole awful business was rounded off last Sunday with a so-called “cleansing” ceremony held at Ellis Park. As expected all the dignitaries were there to be seen, and what little I watched seemed to be done with some reserve I specifically exclude Don Mattera’s quite appalling alliterative poem. What did strike me as contradictory was the fact that they don’t regularly hold these sort of ceremonies for the legions of other casualties in our happy new democracy. When it comes to violent and unnecessary deaths, the Easter weekend’s road toll was far in excess of the Ellis Park numbers. Do, say, the 30 dead in a bus crash not qualify for national lament? For that matter, the hundreds of thousands of the murdered, the tens of thousands of babies born with HIV? With a single exception the cricket coverage from the West Indies has been extremely good. What they needn’t have done was to include bombastic know-all Geoffrey Boycott in their commentator line-up. Boycott is no longer used by self-respecting television outfits, those which believe that woman-beating isn’t something lightly forgiven. And so Boycott now makes out with organisations that don’t care if their commentators savagely beat up their girlfriends.
Mind you, if anything does need some cleansing it’s M-Net’s SuperSport. Remember those adorable Hansie Cronje interviews?