Gwede Mantashe, ANC secretary general and the party's principal berserker has, like the proverbial stuck record, been off about the media again, complaining about how rubbish and stupid we all are.

This latest outburst, in Thursday's Sowetan, followed a dreary despatch in that newspaper concerning an ANC report into the infighting among its leaders in North West ahead of the 2009 general elections.

Why this was deemed newsworthy in the first place is, of course, a great mystery. It is far from surprising, at least as far as we're concerned here at the Mahogany Ridge, that senior party members would carp and bitch among themselves. The North West, after all, is an arid, fly-blown backwater. How else does one pass the time up there?

In any event, and according to the Sowetan report, which may or may not have been incorrect, Mantashe was supposed to have acted on the matter but didn't. Rather than confining his remarks to that newspaper however, he has instead directed his bilge at the entire profession. 

"The critical challenge is that the South African media industry suffers from a dearth of journalistic quality," he charged. "The newsrooms abound with junior reporters lacking in the most basic skills associated with the trade, including those of checking and crosschecking information."

Sadly, that is much the case. For example, on the very day Mantashe's remarks appeared in print, three senior Mail & Guardian staffers -- editor Nic Dawes, and investigative journalists Sam Sole and Stefaans Brumer -- were, alas, prevented from abounding with the juniors in their own newsroom because they had to report to police in Pretoria where they were told they were suspects in a criminal investigation.

Briefly put, this criminal investigation concerned an attempt by the reporters to delve into allegations that presidential spokesman Mac Maharaj and his wife received large sums of money from companies associated with the arms deal and with Schabir Shaik  at a time when Maharaj was transport minister and various Shaik companies were bidding for contracts from the transport department.

But back to Mantashe, who wants journalists to "avoid acting as couriers of factional agendas inside political parties, in particular the ANC. When a journalist lacks the aforementioned qualities, they tend to depend on gossip or corridor talk peddled as authentic information. Journalists become cannon fodder to groups or factions seeking to advance their own views, or seeking to project a particular perception about the organisation or certain individuals."

Such concern for our welfare is touching, it really is. But, at the risk of appearing churlish, let me suggest that with the party's national conference in Mangaung on the horizon, the interest in these "factional agendas" is perhaps warranted. 

Although nominations for party leadership will only be announced in October, campaigning for the top job has been underway for some time now. Only a blind fool would have failed to notice the rictus grin that has been squatting on human settlement minister Tokyo Sexwale's face for the past month. 

For the record, though, let me assure readers that in all the ink-stained years in the profession, I refused to hang around corridors in political party headquarters waiting to be fed gossip from certain individuals. 

It was better, I found, to make up my own rumours. The superstitious minister who employed a sangoma to explain the troubled, gin-fueled dreams? That was mine. The one about the MP with leprosy? Who kept losing fingers when he shook hands with party donors? Me too, I'm afraid.

Readers preferred this sort of thing, to be honest (sort of), to the customary half-truths about a fudged budget leaked by some grubby quisling with an axe to grind. And, besides, it's not well-known, but because they're such liars -- it's the sine qua non of the job -- politicians secretly take great delight in being subject to such slander.

What they don't enjoy, however, is when reporters do quote them accurately. 

Take, for example, KwaZulu-Natal MEC for Agriculture, Meshack Radebe. Two of his VIP protection unit drivers were this week given massive fines and suspended jail sentences following an incident in 2008 in which shots were fired at a motorist on the N3 resulting in a collision in which six people were injured. 

The two officers were on their way to fetch Radebe, then social development MEC, to inspect storm damage somewhere in rural KZN. 

Now Radebe believes other motorists could become reluctant to give way to blue-light vehicles as a result of the sentences handed to the officers. 

As he put it to journalists outside the court: "How can we make an appointment with a disaster... (the public) don't understand what we do?" 

You can't make up stuff like that.

This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.

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