For some time now there’s been a collective wish that Koos Bekker would rock up unannounced at News24 and hold court with an urgent intervention: “Today I’m admitting your editor into the finger-painting class at Valkenberg Hospital where he’ll stay for an indeterminate period. Mr. Roman Cabanac is announced as his replacement, and the ‘fact checker’ will be replaced by a Baywatch poster. Mr. Nick Hedley and Mr. George Claassen have both been given 24 hours to leave the country and report to the SANAE IV base in Antarctica, where there’s a, haha, molester on the loose”.
But it turns out that an intervention isn’t too far a stretch: editor Adriaan Basson has been itching to trade blows with the Americans, and he may just get his huckleberry in the form of the man Donald Trump has tapped as his South African Ambassador-awaiting-credentials, Mr. Leo Brent Bozell III.
It’s unwise to underestimate this appointment: it’s an escalation, and not the kind in which Ebrahim Rasool sits talking to a group of misfits about the Rothschilds and how the old boy had a secret room in his manor where he controlled alien spaceships by a touch screen. Rather, this is a move against ANC foreign policy and, importantly, its media supporters.
Mr. Bozell is a newsman, and a formidable breaker of the fake kind – which happens to be what News24 and some of its prestige contemporaries excel at. He was the founder of News Busters, which has successfully exposed the crisis at the heart of American corporate media: personality journalism, i.e usurping coverage with commentary, coupled with brazen, unethical partisanship.
In 2005, the activist and actor George Clooney produced Goodnight and Good Luck, about the journalist Edward R. Murrow’s relationship with Senator Joe McCarthy. Here the idea that journalists should rely on their own feelings as opposed to the facts on hand was stealthily encouraged. Although Mr. Clooney had nothing to say about the real McCarthyism of our time – the termination with brutal consequences of opinions incongruent with the acceptable narrative – Mr. Bozell was evidently paying attention to the mischievous perversion of information flows and speech freedoms, so he started founding movements aimed at exposing bias against conservatives.
House-trained
By comparison with Mr. Bozell, Joel Pollak, who didn’t get the nod, is house-trained. One of the nicest guys around, he was a fine candidate, and he certainly didn’t deserve to be smeared by News24’s hysterical little munchkins as “alt-right”: a slur for which there is – unsurprisingly – no real evidence. That his Breitbart not only survived the relentless onslaughts of US NGOs and other mysteriously-funded movements to position itself as the administration’s new media of record is testament to Mr. Pollak, editor-in-chief Alex Marlow, and, albeit indirectly, Mr. Bozell.
Mr. Pollak’s measured analysis of what America is entitled to do, particularly as it relates to taxpayer funds, enraged South Africa’s progressives, who believe they’re entitled to stamp their small feet and at the same time keep their mouths open. In the event, his enthusiasm for the role was tempered in recent weeks. Who could blame him? As Ambassador, he could only expect the same treatment his late mother-in-law Rhoda Kadalie was slapped with from the Daily Maverick’s Marianne Thamm, who managed to transform an obituary for Rhoda into her own feelings about Donald Trump.
Media is one dimension of a conundrum that becomes two in a potential clash. Mr. Bozell is an outspoken supporter of Israel, and he won’t find South Africa’s adventures at the ICJ particularly amusing. For the activists at News24 and their friends at the Daily Maverick, this will prompt waves of intense loathing and despair – the kind of theatre they’ve never brought to the ANC’s attention, despite some possibly living in suburbs where there’s been no water for weeks.
Already News24 has seized Mr. Bozell’s son, who was one of the political prisoners incarcerated by the Biden administration for rioting at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Many of these people were non-violent, but there was no Wits Justice Project or Marshall Project for them, so they languished in appalling conditions with intentionally limited access to constitutionally enshrined legal recourse. This was while Democrats and their media supporters tried to frame the riot as “worse than 9/11”.
New Canadian Prime Minister
News24 would never dare mention that Canada’s new Prime Minister sent his then daughter/son to the controversial, discredited and possibly soon-to-be sanctioned Tavistock Clinic in London for gender re-assignment surgery whilst he was Governor of the Bank of England. The children of people they oppose are, however, fair game.
Not since Ken Owen has there been a more insufferable editor in South African media, despite an era that’s witnessed stiff competition from the likes of Steven Motale, Verashni Pillay, and Sipho Kings. Belligerent too – not just the bizarre preoccupation with Trump and the scolding, unhinged open letters to Elon Musk, but past form: assembling a circle-jerk of (mainly) academic elites to piss on the IRR, or the spastic grasping at Jan Braai, Hanks Olde Irish, “Eben-Etzebeth-must-return-from-Japan-for-a-race-hoax,” and Gayton McKenzie.
Nobody has ever said that finding out is pretty. Parachuting oneself into the debate of Presidential preference in a sovereign nation, cheering a farce at The Hague then snapping at heels has resulted in the prospect of an ambassador who resembles a ‘70s Americana LP cover, who keeps a flag of Israel in his X bio, and may just fancy parking his news sleuth tanks on News24’s lawns.
All that’s left is to hope that the Johannesburg Council somehow rejects the participation of the Presidency in the renaming of Sandton Drive. Alternatively, Mr. Basson could write an open letter to Donald Trump claiming that Mr. Bozell’s archive of over 9,000 hours of documented media bias is a “threat to democracy”, so “please reconsider”.
[Photo: L. Brent Bozel III/X @BrentBozell]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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