”I can resist everything except temptation,” Oscar Wilde once said. It’s arguably the master’s most repeated witticism, mainly because it’s a handy way of telling people you’re about to do something you shouldn’t, like gloat immoderately about your magazine’s content in the editor’s column. Were it not for the softening effect of the aforementioned quote, such an act could easily be deemed distasteful.
So it’s all happening in The Media this month. Denis Beckett has produced what we regard as a peerless take on Saki Macozoma, we’ve got the letter outlining Caxton’s resumption of MIT funding, ThisDay execs tell us why they reckon there’s a fat gap in the newspaper market, Harry Herber speaks up on racism in the ad industry, and Graeme Addison delivers a thought-provoking finale to his series on Afrikaans media. We also have SABC TV news chief Jimi Matthews dropping anecdotes from his past and Gary Alfonso of Summit getting heavy with ”corporate content” guerillas.
Then there are the Bullard/Mulholland e-mails. Veering a touch overboard, one might say they’re reminiscent of the penmanship duels between Dominick Dunne and Gore Vidal in Vanity Fair, or between Tom Wolfe and the Mailer-Irving-Updike triumvirate in just about every literary magazine of the last quarter century. But we won’t go that far. We’ll just say they’re bloody hilarious and well worth the read.
”He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.” That’s another Oscar Wilde quote, which is kind of appropriate at this point.