OUT TO LUNCH

You can’t keep flogging a dead horse as the saying goes, so last week News24 (which describes itself as “South Africa’s leading source of trusted news” ….stop sniggering at the back of the class) decided to drop both the Roman Cabanac and Renaldo Gouws stories and cast around for a new victim. The good news for my mate Roman though is that he is still click bait after six weeks with the Daily Maverick reporting as recently as last Friday:

Cabanac exit – The process to get rid of Steenhuisen’s recalcitrant chief of staff could drag on for months

Recalcitrant is defined as having “an obstinately uncooperative attitude towards authority or discipline”. I phoned Roman to congratulate him for dominating the news after so many weeks and to confess to a touch of envy when it comes to all the free publicity he’s been getting. My little spat with that Sunday newspaper pales by comparison.

Of course, there’s absolutely no reason for Roman to resign from his position as chief of staff for the Min of Ag. As far as I am aware he hasn’t filched any money from the department, hasn’t awarded a lucrative contract to set up a massive cannabis farming enterprise to a close relative and hasn’t done a Mohamed Al Fayad number on any of the female staff members.

He’s barely been in the position long enough to prove that he is either up to the task or not so there is absolutely no reason or motivation to resign: particularly as the orcs and bedwetters have done their level best to smear his reputation and make sure he never gets a job in South Africa ever again.

Since Roman will be forgoing a R1.4 million per annum salary plus perks there is every reason, particularly as the father of a young family, to hang in there and hope the HR department demonstrate more decency than the minister who initially employed him.

It’s important to remember that Roman didn’t apply for this job; the job applied for him and for the invertebrate DA to be bullied into submission by social media and the wokist mainstream media, while not entirely surprising, shows a pathetic lack of both good judgement and guts. Rather as the pigs and the humans start to look alike and are difficult to tell apart at the end of George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ I am wondering if the GNU is going to have the same effect and the DA’s will be barely distinguishable from the ANC’s. Oink oink.

Back to that leading source of trusted news though. A newspaper’s news room has what is called a diary meeting to decide what it is going to print and what it is going to put out on the webpage. The newspaper’s best and brightest will be gathered around a large boardroom table and the editor will ask certain staff members if they have followed up on last week’s breaking story about cable theft in the Eastern Cape.

Then the meeting moves on to what to lead with this week and the whole point of this exercise is to come up with something that will a) sell newspapers b) generate viral clickbait with social media spreading the story far and wide. This is all financially driven obviously and morality plays no part in it.

Last week, having wrung every last drop out of the Cabanac and Gouws stories, the editor decided that the publication needed a new victim to hang out to dry. Now, the modus operandi of a leading source of trusted news (I asked you to please stop sniggering at the back) is to find a white person, preferably a heterosexual male, take something he has said or done out of context and present it as yet another example of the vile racism that so many South Africans have to cope with every day.

So, last week, it was the turn of Jan Braai (Jan Scannell) who was accused of not handing out free boerewors rolls to some Food Lover’s Market shoppers ahead of Heritage Day celebrations (also known to some as National Braai Day). A video of the event was posted which the news hounds at News24 decided was all the proof they needed that Jan Braai was an out and out racist for only handing out his rolls to white folks.

It also obviously helps to only use the small snippet of video that supports your case. As any leading source of trusted news knows context is important but not as important as taking something out of context if the real story doesn’t measure up to your race baiting requirements.

Within a very short time of the release of the selectively edited version on News24’s website Jan Braai was being denounced as a racist and probably many other things besides by the more gullible readers of News24. When this happens the media normally move into phase two of Operation Smear which involves seeking out further evidence against the accused. For example, a thorough search of all Jan Braai’s social media posts to discover any references to black pudding as an alternative to boerewors.

CORRECTION: On Monday, News24 published a story based on a Food Lover's Market marketing video after people experienced the video as racist.

We approached Jan Braai and angled the story around his denial of the racism allegations that stemmed from the video, which were already… pic.twitter.com/sDQRLVQQh0

— News24 🇿🇦 (@News24) September 24, 2024

The aim here is to ramp up the hatred to such an extent that Jan Braai becomes a figure of loathing and loses all chance of earning an income. Any dropped contracts that might follow are then obviously of his own making and provide yet more clickbait for the follow up story. Thus is the hungry media monster sated.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go entirely according to plan with Operation Smear and there was a considerable amount of what, in my schoolboy French, we might call ‘oeuf sur le visage’. A fuller video of the proceedings was discovered just in time and it showed Jan Braai handing out free boerewors rolls to shoppers of all colours and also showed him handing out gifts to small children.

Interestingly, the two News24 ‘journalists’ who broke this story very quickly went on to Twitter (X) and restricted their accounts, effectively making them impossible to access unless you have been invited. This would suggest to me that the worm really turned within a few days and the universal object of loathing and hatred was no longer Jan Braai but those who had hung him out to dry. I won’t mention names just in case legal action against News24 is forthcoming, both for crimen injuria and for libel. The aim of the smear was evidently to discredit Jan Braai and to be detrimental to his various business interests. I have however pledged R5 000 initially towards legal costs as have several others on Twitter.

More heartwarming though was a tweet from The Kiffness which said “You can never cancel Jan Braai but you can cancel your @News 24 subscription” which was followed by people doing just that and posting the “We’re sorry to see you go” confirmations of cancellation.

I doubt whether a complaint to the Press Ombud would be particularly rewarding in this case but it’s becoming evident that a large number of South Africans of all races are becoming increasingly sick of the constant fake news, the virtue signalling and the race baiting of some of our news sources.

The Daily Maverick have already said they need to slim down on staff and they send me a begging letter almost daily, pretending that what they are doing is for the good of South African democracy. Like most of the other purveyors of increasingly dubious news they claim that this is a global malaise affecting all the world’s journalists.

Not so. The Spectator magazine (to which I subscribe online) has just been bought for the equivalent of R2.3 billion by Sir Paul Marshall and former Tory minister Michael Gove becomes editor. The magazine has steadily increased circulation both in print and online and it has done so by consistently publishing intelligent comment from people who can write well. People like Rod Liddle, Douglas Murray, Julie Burchill, Lionel Shriver and Toby Young to mention but a few. So don’t believe all that gumph about how the media will die without your money. Those that deserve to die will die but, as we learn from our African wildlife, the strongest survive.