EVERY once in a while the wire services throw up an item that rises head and shoulders above the grey wash of the news ether and screams for our attention.
Such an item was the statement on Thursday by the Higher Education Transformation Network condemning what it termed "the continued irresponsible journalism practices perpetrated by the Daily Sun."
Of particular concern, according to the network's executive director, Sethole Reginald Legoabe, was the tabloid's "downright gutter reporting" which it "peddled to four million South Africans", most of them poor.
And who exactly, I hear you asking, is the Higher Education Transformation Network?
Good question. According to their website, they're a network of alumni from various South African tertiary education institutions who are committed to a more "equitable and meaningful access to education, knowledge, skills and learning to ensure an education system that is more accessible by the marginalized and the poor", and so on.
On paper, it all seems very noble and stuff. But they have a record of baseless and often loopy attacks on Higher Education SA, the body that represents the country's public universities, accusing them of all sorts of heinous offences, such as meeting in "air conditioned luxurious offices" to devise various ways in which to derail "the fast-tracking of transformation."