Professor Guy Berger at the Mondi Shanduka Newspaper Awards held in April said, speaking on behalf of all the judges, while the quality of entries were generally excellent, there appeared to be a tendency among journalists to tackle issues using the same old exhausted angles and phrases.
Last month, South Africans celebrated the fifth anniversary of Take a Girl Child to Work Day – an initiative aimed at exposing teenage girls between the ages of 14 and 18 to a world of possibilities in whatever field of their dream.
About 800 companies and over 200,000 school girls were expected to participate this year, according to a press release sent by mobile technology company Cell C, which is the main sponsor of the programme.
The well-intending initiative aims to address imbalances caused by the past where women were marginalised – a situation that unfortunately still exists if one is to judge by the small number of women in decision-making positions.
While I don’t doubt the significance or necessity of such a programme, an interesting conversation I had recently with an unlikely suspect, I may say – the editor of a successful tabloid which we all love to hate – made me realise how unquestioning and uncritical we, the media, can be.
Yes, I know there are those who blame this on the age of press releases where some journalists don’t bother to probe any further but this does not apply to everyone.
“Why do we have, year after year on Take a Girl Child to Work Day, front page articles depicting a group of girls at the offices of a well-known personality or politician? I still need to come across an article that questions or even looks at the flipside of the programme, asking what young boys should be doing while their female counterparts are taken to go meet the president.
“I think it’s important that the media starts looking at the long term effect of such programmes because when you visit our prisons, the majority of inmates are boys, many of whom were not given an opportunity to see what else the world has to offer. There was no one who took them to go meet a CEO or some engineer who would say to them ‘If you work hard, this is what you could become’. It’s like they are being made to pay for the wrongs of the past, and trust me, they are feeling it.”
His take, and this is open to debate, is that this is why the country sees such high numbers of rape and assault cases, all gender-based. He says it is because men, boys included, are feeling disempowered.
He maintains that we are sitting on a time bomb, and reading a copy of his newspaper, his readers are reminded of this quite often.
Anyway, while I will not comment on his rationale for the increasing levels of certain crimes in this country, I do agree that this is an issue worth discussing openly on the media platform.
After all, don’t we ask the same questions when discussing initiatives such as Black Economic Empowerment, querying when will the playing fields be levelled out?
Yes change, such as seeing the benefits of such well-meaning programmes, takes time but as much as the media readily and happily reports on the intentions of Take a Girl Child to Work, I believe we also have a duty to monitor and report on the possible implications.