Believe me, I have been trying to avoid it, but every now and then one has to deal with a serious subject and I regret that now is one of those trying times.

But, before we journey together on a mind-numbing foray, let me share two small matters with you - to cheer you up before we start.

The first is that if my mother had lived past the year of 2002, she would have been a hundred years old today (4 August). Yet she did all sorts of life-shortening things such as smoking, reading books, trying to behave rationally, being patient with her children, being married to my father, bearing me, and so on.

Thus the following e-mail from my biological brother Joel in Israel: "If Micky Gordin had lived, she would have been 100 years old today. When I told this to Yossi, my green grocer, he retorted: ‘If my mother had balls, she would have been my father'.  It sounds funnier in Hebrew. Nevertheless, I thought I would mention it."

Secondly, one of the things the ANC and various other bozos have been complaining about in connection with the media is that it is sometimes filled with sensationalist balderdash.

Not so, says the media. Nonetheless, I found this yesterday morning in The Times (the daily one): "US pop star Lady Gaga ... said: ‘I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they're going to take my creativity through my vagina'."

Well, I don't know about that. I have, however, heard it said that many women lose their brains when they give birth. But that sounded to me like the usual male chauvinist manure put out by ... males - who are deeply jealous because they can't give birth. (Sigmund Freud had it the wrong way round.)

But, speaking of which - and here we have, alas, to move on to the weighty issue of press freedom - it has come to my attention that there are some people (mainly Seffrican males, interestingly) who have clearly lost their brains recently - and, it would seem, their balls as well.

Now, although there exists a Yiddish saying (Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd) which, freely and politely translated, goes like this - "When the penis pops up, the brain retracts" - these people to whom I am referring have not lost their brains (and balls) via their sexual appendages or orifices a la Lady Gaga.

No. They have lost them, apparently, simply by being members of the ANC and organizations related thereto.

But - be warned - you can also lose your brain and cojones simply as a result of being stupid (as well as a little ugly on the side). For example, I know a leading legal academic - no names, no litigation - who is definitely not an ANC member yet wishes that the media had but one head so that he could lop it off. He thinks that we (by which I mean the media, though I no longer carry a press card) are a bunch of useless tossers who can't get anything right.

But I digress. Let us return to the large body of men ("ugh gross," my daughter would say) whose brains have apparently vacated their cerebella. The reason we know this has happened to them - that they are bereft of their senses, especially the common one - is that they support, one way or another, (1) the Protection of Information Bill and (2) a statutory Media Appeals Tribunal (MAT).

To cut a long story short, the proposed bill will, through chronic over-classification, by claiming safeguards that are symbolic rather than practical, by adopting a bulldozer approach to criminalizing unauthorised disclosure, and by failing to "see" that unauthorised disclosure in the public interest should be protected - the proposed bill would basically act as protection for all those pursuing corruption of all sorts.

Stanley Uys (see here) has pretty much said all there is to be said on the subject. He quoted Dave Steward, executive director of the FW de Klerk Foundation: "'Any government information can be classified if disclosure would be harmful to the ‘national interest'. Classification embraces almost anything. One example, says Steward, is that potentially ‘problematical' parastatals like Eskom (electricity) and SAA (airline) ‘can be removed from public scrutiny'."

Then - and again I digress slightly - to get a handle on the much-vaunted tribunal, I had to read an ANC discussion document written (for want of a better word) for the ANC's National General Council, September 20 - 24 2010, Durban.

Titled "Media Transformation, Ownership and Diversity", this thick end of a very blunt instrument could kill you with boredom (see here).

Jeez, talk about the putz losing its spring ... this document is a dick-shrinker extraordinaire. I am a bloody hero, I tell you, to have read it. The ANC must be paying danger pay to the okes who write this mind-numbing balderdash, really.

Who actually wrote this circa 9 000-word piece of smelly neo-Marxist poo? ("... Journalists are [not] unique human beings with unique journalistic genes and genealogy. They are impacted upon by the environment within which they operate, by the circumstances that spawn them.") Steyn Speed? Vusi Mona? Jeremy Cronin? David Bullard? Ronald S Roberts? Essop Pahad? Blade Nzimande? Joel Netshitenzhe? Panjo the tiger? Chris Vick? Musa Xulu? Plutarch? Thabo Mbeki?

Here's an example of the dockie's intellectual level and prose style: "But there is another school of thought that this self-regulation mechanism [the media's self-control, the ombudsman, etc] ... only serves the interest of the media as opposed to serving the interest [sic] of the broader South African society."

The ANC has suddenly discovered the interests of the "broader" society.

Or this: "Our objectives therefore are to vigorously communicate the ANC's outlook and values (developmental state, collective rights, values of caring and sharing community, solidarity, ubuntu, non-sexism, working together) versus the current mainstream media's ideological outlook (neo-liberalism, a weak and passive state, and over-emphasis on individual rights, market fundamentalism, etc)."

Well, blow me down with a feather! It turns out that the perfidious media have been playing by the rules of capitalism - the very capitalism that has helped all the big wigs in the ANC become filthy rich and corrupt. Just who do the media think they are? Why are they also running after the "market" and people's "individual rights"?

This stuff is the most unbelievable cant. Even I am close to speechless.

Or try this: "Cursory scan on [sic] the print media reveals an astonishing degree of dishonesty, lack of professional integrity and lack of independence. Editorials distancing the paper from these acts and apologies which are never given due prominence and mostly which has [sic] to be forced through the press ombudsman are not sufficient in dealing with this ill [sic]."

What? One of the only people I know of who has actually been "dishonest" is that ANC bozo from the Cape who is about to be made ambassador to the US (and, ja, the guys who took the money - obviously).

What's a lack of "professional integrity"? Is it the general-secretary of the SA Communist Party, which has a fine and proud record, driving around in some obscenely expensive luxury vehicle and staying at the Mt Nelson hotel while many in his bailiwick do not even have food to eat?

Then the aforementioned Blade Nzimande, who has pushed off to Russia with the president for the moment, also had a go recently (see here) and for some reason went on a rave about the Independent group.

He wrote: "Communists didn't make these sacrifices so that a handful of capitalist press barons could decide what is ‘news' and what isn't. Communist journalists didn't sacrifice their lives so that a foreign media company under an Irishman could dominate the so-called Independent Newspaper Group which, in turn, dominates the English-language print media in our country."

Couple of things here. The foreign media company, owned by the Irishman, does not "dominate" the Independent group; it owns it. Second, according to the ANC's own tiresome document (see above), the Independent does not dominate the English-language print media; some other group does - I think it's Caxton.

Third, it was the beloved Madiba who sealed the deal with Sir Anthony O'Reilly, earning himself - Madiba did - a little holiday in the Bahamas into the bargain. Fourth, watch the xenophobia there, Blade; we don't approve of it here.

Of course Nzimande does get some of it correct. He continues: "This Irish controlling company, by the way, is in financial trouble, but its South African newspapers are making money. So what are they doing? They are sucking millions of rands out of our local newspapers to prop up their overseas interests. And the result? Experienced journalists are being retrenched. Poorly paid junior journalists are expected to write on issues they do not understand. All journalists are being threatened with retrenchment if they don't report the ‘right' kind of news."

That's partially correct. And of course, Blade, they should never have retrenched an experienced old fart such as I; we all know that.

But you know what, Blade? That's how capitalism - which is the system we live in and which pays for grants for the poor and Fifa soccer tournaments and your fancy car and which we all have to deal with - that's how it works.

If the bozos in charge want to retrench people, that's what they'll do. In some sense, they'll pay for it later - or the company will - in terms of the poor quality newspapers they put out. Look at The Sunday Independent these days. But hey, they were told to cut costs. It's called business. No piss-willy tribunal is going to change that.

And by the way, the sentence "All journalists are being threatened with retrenchment if they don't report the ‘right' kind of news" is outright rubbish. The guys in charge of most of the media companies (the business people, I mean, the bean counters, not the editors) wouldn't know a news story if it bit them on their collective fat arse.

Enough now. I'm growing as long-winded as the ANC. The irony of all this is that most of the newspapers and groups in this country are the poodles - as Arik Sharon would have said - of the present regime. They think the ANC pees eau de cologne.

Sure, Mondli Makhanya at the Sunday Times went after Jacob Zuma before he was president - but Makhanya was soon told to turn down the volume and then to go off and write the most expensive weekly column in the country.

There are also a few other brave exceptions who do not behave like poodles: the Mail&Guardian still runs some brave investigations, Politicsweb carries some fine stuff, Business Day has some acute commentary.

But for the most part ...

So why have the ANC and all who sail in her tossed away their brains and balls? I'm not entirely certain yet.

But I think every one's shit-scared of being discovered doing things that people truly committed to the "developmental state, collective rights, values of caring and sharing community, solidarity, ubuntu, non-sexism, and working together" should not be doing.

Besides, there are far more serious issues requiring attention just now than the media - so one engenders a little hysteria about the media and no one focuses on what they ought to be focusing. And we all go to hell, as Ted Hughes's Crow once remarked.

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