COLUMNIST MAX DU PREEEZ'S IGNORANCE
Max Du Preez's tirade ("ANC hides behind worst party whip", Cape Times ,28 May 2013) reminded me of one of Plato's maxims, "an empty vessel makes the loudest noise" (see here). Here's a columnist who offers a public commentary on the functioning of parliament, yet he exhibits so much ignorance regarding its rules, practices and conventions.
Du Preez' piece represents all that is wrong with the state of our punditocracy: always eager to opine on anything under the sun, regardless of whether it is knowledgeable on the subject or not. The punditocracy's ever-expanding pretension to expertise in areas its members could not be fairly expected to master, says Eric Alterman in his book Sounds and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy, is responsible for the increasing misinformation and misinterpretation in political discourse.
One would expect a veteran pundit like Du Preez to at least conduct a rudimentary research on the topic he opines on, rather than submit a cut and paste of DA's media statements on the topic. The problem with columns, says Alterman, is that they force pundits down the same hole into which reporters historically fall: they become prisoners of their sources.
Alterman says that shallow pieces, and I'm certain Du Preez's is one of them, are illustrative of pundits' submission to temptations of laziness, self-satisfaction, and plain-old burnout. "Only a negligible number of pundits manage to pull off the simultaneous feats of intellect, reporting, and integrity required to write an honest analytical column about the panoply of issues...," argues Alterman.
Had Du Preez bothered to conduct a quick research on the functioning of Parliament, he would have found some of his assertions, including his questioning of the President's attendance of Parliament, silly.