I wasn’t thinking clearly when I asked News24’s in-house doxxer Kyle Cowan earlier this week if he’d seduced the African man his ex-partner accused him of cheating on her with by wearing the uniform of a Virgin Atlantic air steward. In hindsight it might have been more an Air New Zealand occasion − “Kia Ora” − with his hair dyed strawberry blonde and his fringe worn deliberately low so as to disguise his lobotomy scar.
Conventional wisdom suggests the market decides what happens to activist media organisations and their brainwashed employees. Certain preventative steps have also included intensive Rorschach testing to find out whether these people see things like machetes in the shapes – also useful for ANC and Green Party politicians with social media accounts.
But nothing serves any meaningful point anymore: the reason why we’re still staring into this pit of access, gotcha, punching-down journalism always running cover for the establishment was presented all the way back in May 2017.
Then, in conjunction with the London Press Club, a neuroscientist called Dr Tara Swart sampled 31 journalists, 90% of whom self-identified as “progressive”. The purpose of the research was to see how these people managed the pressure of deadlines but what was revealed, however, was akin to a famous person confessing under hypnosis on live television that they’d collected vast amounts of inappropriate data and stored it on a secret hard drive.
Too much alcohol
Journalists emerged from the exercise as inchoate adjacent. Their brains did not function like a normal person’s did, you see – too much alcohol and South Asian takeaway fried in seed oil. They were socially adrift, had few friends with whom they invariably formed echo chambers and were constantly battling violent thoughts. They appeared to be torn between two places: reality, and the lives they were instructed to live by their university professors, then later their editors.
At some point you imagine Dr Swart being overwhelmed by the information, pleading with her researchers to stop talking.
Around the same period I witnessed this in real time. The previous year, the UK left the EU, and many activist journalists lost their minds. One was The Observer’s Carol Cadwalladr. She went mad, got sued, went even madder, got sued again, then ventured beyond the available measurement parameters for diagnosing madness – until the UK Court of Appeal slapped her down in 2023 and ordered her to write a letter to man called Arron Banks committing not to lie about him again (along with damages).
Her newspaper was then offloaded by its parent to a start-up who didn’t renew her contract. For all that madness, zero return.
Then there was George Eaton who lied about his country’s greatest contemporary philosopher (Roger Scruton). Then Mark di Stefano, an Australian who tried to get people jailed for their political views. He lasted a week at the Financial Times. James O’Brien, Jon Sopel, the countless, compelled apologies from BBC journalists made through gritted teeth and furrowed brows and accentuated temple veins to people they’d smeared or insulted and clearly hated – accompanied by social media meltdowns and pleas of mental health vulnerability.
The one feature common through every single hysteria? These people are unwell. It was their personal activism that did it.
“Exposed”
Back in Cape Town, a man called Sebastiaan Jooste has been “exposed” by Kyle Cowan and News24. Mr Jooste is neither a beneficiary of the arms deal nor a hospital tenderpreneur. He has no power. He doesn’t run a cash-in-transit heist ring with a bunch of paramilitaries from failed African states, he doesn’t trade poached rhino horn with the Vietnamese and to all information currently available, he doesn’t flog synthetic puberty blockers on the black market. Given recent events, he may wish he did – it would almost certainly garner him more sympathy.
Mr Jooste expresses his constitutional rights. Is he guilty of omitting context? Yes, but who isn’t? Could he be more accurate on occasion – in the manner demanded of international folk commenting on the country? Sure. But he doesn’t fire automatic weapons at protests. He doesn’t rip off cancer victims. Above everything, he doesn’t deserve threats that involve the lives of his children.
The response is interesting because its form differs from previous responses to previous confected outrages. Normally people are drawn to “investigations” on the assumption of controversial revelations. But there is zero interest in the “investigation” here − evident by News24’s own tracking.
Race hoaxing
This may be because this organisation already boasts an impressive record of race hoaxing, but more likely it’s because Mr Jooste is plainly the subject of naked punching down by people whose sensitivities have been offended. More? Perhaps: I would caution that the organisation is starting to get clumsy in its enthusiasm to impress the same political party it claims always to have held to account.
What happened to activist journalists in the UK and the US should have been cautionary tales, but mad people are incapable of acknowledging patterns. They’ll double down on their humiliations, cry inconsolably in front of the psychotherapist − because nobody listens when they demand everyone think like Thuli Madonsela − not appear for days when the migraines of social justice fantasy torment them, or lie to the partners they secretly hate, or lash out at strangers when they think they’ve heard the word “dwarf” mentioned in a coffee shop.
If you can stomach the injustice of seeing a man’s life stripped because his views have irked some troubled journalists, then I urge you stick around, because these things turn − and its always entertaining watching a bully feel the sharp end of their own spastic hubris.
[Image: sarahlawrence603 from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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