Yes, yes......I know the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) isn't perfect. All that Jimmy Savile paedophile cover up stuff puts them on a par with the Catholic Church. My wife had never heard of Jimmy Savile because she's a Saffer but I grew up with the creepy bastard. There he was on TV's "Top of the Pops " with the teenagers dancing on a raised stage and the cameramen instructed to focus the cameras up their skirts. It was pervy stuff but I was a spotty teenage viewer at the time and it was the nearest we got back then to online porn. If anybody had told us that Jimmy Savile was luring the teenage lovelies we were all lusting after back to his dressing room for a grope we would have been devastated.
Then there was the "Jim'll Fix It" show where Savile would sit in a large armchair, dressed in what became known as a shell-suit , bedecked with heavy gold jewellery and smoking a large cigar. It was a bit like sitting on Santa Claus's lap and kids would write into Jim with their dream and Jim would make it happen. "Dear Jim, I want to dominate the SA media for a couple of years and give the whiteys bad dreams. Yours faithfully Julius M". That sort of thing. "How's about that then guys and gals?" was Savile's catch phrase and it seems highly appropriate in the wake of hundreds of complaints from people who have suddenly remembered they were molested by Savile forty years ago. How's about that the indeed? As they say in the legal profession, where's there blame there's a claim.
The Savile affair may not be the BBC's finest hour and it certainly shows up the appalling procedural gaps in what has become a creaking bureaucracy but one has to admit, maybe grudgingly, that the British national broadcaster has produced some terrific work over the years and that the Jimmy Savile episode is but a small blot on the escutcheon.
Not so the South African Broadcasting Corporation, established by an Act of Parliament in 1936 and obviously modelled on the BBC.
It would be naïve to think that any state owned broadcaster isn't going to punt the official party line. There's nothing wrong with that if independent radio and TV stations are allowed to operate as a check and balance.
This will almost certainly shame any state broadcaster into pretending to be objective and we should only fear propaganda when the state broadcaster is all we are allowed to see and listen to. That's certainly not the case in SA and if the ruling party intended a state run media to brainwash the masses then they've cocked things up spectacularly. Many SABC presenters are bold enough to be critical of the government which is good news for democracy.