/ 2 November 2005

Back Biting

We’re all on red alert this month. The editor has reminded us that The Media is now three years old; off its mother’s breast but still tottering around with a permanently snotty nose, smearing jam over the CD player and leaving dirty finger-marks on all the walls. At least she (I think it’s a she, but they all look the same at this age) is potty-trained and finally getting the hang of talking.

I was, at best, lukewarm when first asked to write a regular column for The Media and initially offered to write on an ad hoc basis. But that never happened and the first column spawned a second and so on for three years. The obvious attraction was the chance to write about an industry known for its prima donnas, poseurs and egoists. Who could refuse an opportunity to have a go at all those old bores who drone on about their distinguished careers and constantly remind us that, had it not been for their liberal attitudes, black journalists wouldn’t have even got a foot in the door? Bullshit! Anyone who survived and drew a regular editorial salary under the country’s state of emergency in the eighties can’t have been upsetting PW Botha too much. Just as there were no National Party voters there were, apparently, no newspaper editors who supported the apartheid system.

The Mondi awards, bad newspaper management, motoring journalism, travel journalism, gush journalism, women’s magazines, crap television shows, financial journalism and the freelance writing rate all came under the scrutiny of the “offline” column. None of it was what you would call balanced journalism. That’s the job of the real journalists on this magazine. The task of a columnist is to set the cat among the pigeons and occasionally bring a smile to reader’s faces.

However, one event stands head and shoulders above all others over the past three years. The great plagiarism debate of 2003 warranted two separate articles. Darrel Bristow-Bovey’s name became a byword for dishonesty as he stubbornly refused to admit that there was anything wrong with lifting huge chunks of other authors’ work and passing it off as his own. Bristow-Bovey’s name is now invoked every time a case of plagiarism crops up in South African journalism, so if it’s immortality we writers seek then he’s probably done rather well.

What surprised me about this whole affair was the support he received from other journalists who also thought a bit of word theft wasn’t really a problem. His publishers Zebra Press (for whom financial interests evidently eclipse morality) accused critical fellow columnists of conducting a witch-hunt. The hostility towards his critics was palpable and rather ugly, but good eventually triumphed and Bovey was finally kicked off three newspapers in one day when an alert reader spotted an astonishing similarity between something Bovey had churned out and something written by the popular Britsih author Jeremy Paxman.

But the cats bark and the caravan moves on so what’s the point of dwelling on the past anyway? After all, is anyone really surprised that a first class publication such as The Media should reach the age of three, even if it is a damn good excuse for a party?

What we should really be dwelling on is the future. I’ve no doubt the magazine will continue to rub the scabs off festering sores and upset important people, which is easily done in a vainglorious industry such as ours. Equally important though is the nurturing of new talent and the recognition of excellence such as the annual MTN Women in the Media awards. In only three years The Media has become the undisputed voice of the industry. Just think what a precocious brat it could be at the age of six.