Outcome-based TV reporting

Staff Reporter

23 NOV 2001, 08:12

7 min read

you have to admit that South African television and radio have something special to offer visitors from overseas. Thanks to the efforts of such doughty South African prophets as Albert Hertzog — one-time minister of posts and telegraphs in the heyday of National Party rule — television was banned in this country. It only got going about 20 years after everyone else had it.

There are some who to this day believe that Hertzog had the right idea and that, since its advent in South Africa, television has done little but install and ratify the basest of intellectual and social values in the community that has watched it. South Africans have been dumbed down by their television by an order of about 60%, which process pushed a good deal of them on to the negative side of zero.

I think that’s going a bit far, but only a bit. What also needs to be acknowledged is that South African television has made some very positive steps. It remains at the cutting edge of what is now termed the ”democratic communications industry”. No more tellingly can this be witnessed than in South African television news reporting.

I was listening to e.tv’s suave anchor man, San Reddy, the other evening and couldn’t help but wonder what some visitor from an anglophone country would make of what must sound like an exotic dialect emitting smoothly from our San. ”Pren Ecky sen prompt hay at enny annie vile dugs whoopee fart spens foray gumitted to peel reddy feckted whizzeezes sultan om german back arean udder rays lated caws.” * Translation below reveals a reduction by seven words and many entirely

Unlike fortunate locals the visitor from overseas would not have had the benefit of a couple of years of listening to San as he’s developed and refined his unique matrix for spoken English. It’s been a sort of daily listen-and-learn session in which San patiently has demonstrated that the language does not really need all its breath-wasting and tongue-tiring conjunctives, consonants, prepositions and so on.

San’s version of spoken English — known locally as SanSpeak — is a bit like Pittman’s shorthand. SanSpeak is a series of seemingly erratic aural twirls and squiggles and poppings-of-the-lips that, when listened to, make perfect sense to anyone who has taken the trouble to learn how to interpret it.

The other great benefit of SanSpeak is that, freed from any need to utter all the tedious syntactical connective tissue, the user of this millennium-friendly speech form can pack a lot more information into a sentence.

Anyone in the e.tv newsroom will tell you that San Reddy can get through at least 30% more news copy than either of his colleagues. He hurtled through some bulletins at such a spanking pace last week that two of e.tv’s sign-language interpreters went down with repetitive strain injury trying to keep up with him.

I believe there are several visiting study groups currently in this country to report back to their sponsors in Europe and the United States on new South African trends in television news reporting.

What with terrorist attacks and the attending seamless analysis of Afghanistan or Israeli or Palestinian or Baltic or US or British politics, there is clearly a need for a fresh approach to news presentation, something to lift us out of a descending nightmare. South African television again leads the way.

And it will not be only e.tv that will delight the overseas visitor or researcher whiling away an evening surfing the South African television bouquet. What about the scintillating verbal calisthenics of the average SABC news bulletin, the provocative newsroom wordplay of lines such as: ”Terrible trouble in Texas today as titanic twisting typhoon torment takes its terrifying toll”, or even wittier, ”Fourteen unemployed woman was sentenced to eight years jail each today for their gang-fellating of a Belgian missionary in the Port Elizabeth Magistrate’s Court”?

Don’t tell me that hearing that sort of reporting doesn’t hoist your spirits above the mundane. If we’re going to have so much crime let’s report it with the zest it warrants. And let’s once and for all free ourselves from the slavish canons of dust-browed grammarians and all those drip-nosed sticklers for ”correct” pronunciation. Book learning is such a drag. Much better to let our inventive souls take over, to let the language flourish into its own democratic patois, with its very own flavour.

Outcome-based television reporting. Should turn Kader’s bottom green with delight.

*President Mbeki said in Parliament today that any anti-retroviral drugs would be far too expensive for a government committed to people already infected with diseases resulting from germs and bacteria and other race-related causes.

The Mail&Guardian, November 23, 2001

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