Over the past 20 years the IRR has commissioned seven opinion surveys on race relations. All seven reveal that the proportion of black Africans (blacks) who think race relations have improved outnumbers the proportion who think the opposite.
At the same time, however, the number of blacks who report that they have no “personal experience” of racism has risen from 46% in 2001 to 81% last year.
John Kane-Berman Politicsweb 3/5/2021
It used to be unthinkable but these days it is not unusual to see a whole media group peddle dangerous xenophobic content based on lies and deliberate mischaracterisations. I cannot think of any reason why this should be done if not to create social instability and political anarchy.
Songezo Zibi News24 15/5/2021
As John Kane-Berman points out in the first quote above, the majority of black African respondents in Institute of Race Relations opinion surveys have testified that they do not experience racism in their daily lives and that it is not one of their major concerns.
However, as former Business Day editor, Songezo Zibi, points out in the second quote, there is one media group that, for nefarious reasons, constantly seeks to poison the race relations well.
Which media group could he be referring to?
There are four major newspaper companies in South Africa – Media 24, Arena Holdings, Caxton and CTP, and Sekunjalo Independent Media (SIM). Bob van Djik is CEO of Naspers, Ishmet Davidson is CEO of Media 24 and Rika Swart heads the Media 24 print division. Tshepo Mahloele is CEO at Arena Holdings, Terry Moolman and Noel Cobur at CTP and Caxton and Iqbal Survé at Sekunjalo.
Iqbal Survé is constantly in the headlines, mainly through oleaginous puff pieces in his own newspapers – see here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here, with pride of place going to an imbongi interview with Aneez Salie.
The senior news company executives in the other newspaper companies are, in comparison, low-key individuals.
There is, however, a foundational difference between the editorial approaches of these newspaper groups and this is obviously what Songezo Zibi was referring to in the News 24 article which is the source of the quote above.
Dictates news content
Although the allegation was denied at the time, former AYO executive Siphiwe Nodwele testified at the Mpati Commission hearings that Iqbal Survé dictates news content at Sekunjalo.
A fundamental difference between Sekunjalo’s news content and that of the other companies is the way in which Survé’s newspapers seek to portray white people as innately racist.
The motivation for this clearly comes from the company owner who has never hidden his antipathy to white people and constantly plays the race card or, using the Stratcom smear, dismisses rival media companies and reporters as apartheid sympathisers.
Implementing this approach is Aneez Salie on whose watch as editor, the circulation of the Cape Times dropped from around 30 000 daily when he was appointed in February 2015 to less than 10 000 now, and who, as a reward, has been made head of news overall.
His former colleagues at the Cape Times have told me that what drove Salie to weaponise the newspaper against whites in general and white farmers in particular was his anger at the way he and his former wife, Shirley Gunn, were mistreated when they were arrested as MK operatives by the apartheid-era security police.
What Paper Tiger, the evidence before the Mpati Commission and the submissions to the SANEF inquiry into ethical journalism, have shown us is that once the initial goal of driving out newsroom staff of integrity had been achieved, good-faith journalism ceased to exist at the Cape Times in particular and at the other titles as well – see here and here.
My first experience of this occurred shortly after Aneez Salie became editor of the Cape Times and it published an article to which Helen Zille drew attention.
It was headlined ‘Foetal Alcohol Syndrome’s Sad Legacy’ and it claimed that wine farmers in the Western Cape had embarked on a deliberate programme of inducing wide-scale foetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) among their women employees through the use of the illegal ‘tot system’.
As it turned out, the closest the reporter who had written the article had come to a foetal alcohol syndrome case was to a foetus in formalin in the medical museum at the Tygerberg Hospital.
Ratchet up hatred
My investigation showed that the fictitious alcoholic mother, ‘Rose’, and ‘Baby Thomas’, her fictitious son, the alleged victims of the evil wine farmers and their illegal practices, did not exist.
Aneez Salie did not respond to my challenge that he call a press conference to name and shame the farmers responsible. He did not respond because the article was a pack of lies deliberately written to ratchet up hatred against a commercial sector which is the largest employer in the province, its most significant exporter and renowned for its efforts to enhance the quality of life of its employees.
The reporter concerned resigned and Salie suffered no sanction.
This attempt to demonise the province’s food producers has continued ever since.
Just as evil was another false claim of racism which saw five white youths, innocent of any crime, imprisoned in one of the world’s most dangerous jails, Pollsmoor. You can read the personal account of their ordeal here.
The reporter concerned resigned and Aneez Salie suffered no sanction
A hatred of white people was a major motivational factor for the murderous Rhodes Must Fall arsonists who were encouraged by Iqbal Survé and the biased reporting of the Cape Times.
The reporter concerned resigned and Aneez Salie suffered no sanction.
Racially inflammatory reporting
What buttresses the claim by Songezo Zibi about the racially inflammatory reporting of one media group is that the politicians with whom Iqbal Survé and Sekunjalo Independent Media have been and are aligned are quite open about their antipathy towards white people (see here and here and here and here).
Here’s the irony.
Survé and Salie claim to revere Nelson Mandela and his name is constantly evoked by them, yet the anti-white news coverage which dominates the pages of SIM newspapers is the antithesis of one of Mandela’s ideals and policy goals – nation building through ethnic reconciliation – something he displayed when he visited Betsy Verwoerd in her Oranje home.
‘People before profits’ proclaims the Sekunjalo website, but Survé has, while living an enviable lifestyle, cut the salaries of his media staff by up to 40% and reduced the medical aid contributions to his company’s pensioners by 50%.
The dwindling numbers of Survé’s remaining staff will have noted that while the Oppenheimers, the Ruperts and Naspers are routinely besmirched in his newspapers, he has not contributed a cent to the Covid-19 Solidarity Fund while they have collectively donated billions of rands to the fund and to affected industries – see here and here and here and here.
As embittered government pensioners have pointed out in two recent media statements – see here and here – they believe that the chances of their ever getting any positive return on the five billion rand invested by the PIC’s Dan Matjila in Iqbal Survé-linked companies is effectively zero.
The ethnically divisive reporting in Iqbal Survé’s newspapers – which carries his imprimatur – belies the reality of racial harmony which the Institute of Race Relations’ opinion surveys have made a matter of record for the past two decades.
[Image: World Economic Forum]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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