Posted inMedia

And the Oscar goes to hypocrisy

The Oscar frenzy has commenced. And I don’t mean the one with the shiny gold men. The trial of the century has begun, you guys. And it’s making me ashamed to work in the media. Look, I’m no legal expert so I don’t have much of an opinion on the proceedings. Except one. Oscar killed […]

Posted inNews/Politics

Pistorius case highlights the failings of social media

Oscar Pistorius is an inspirational icon whose fierce love for his woman inadvertently had nightmarish consequences. That’s what the cloyingly vociferous fans on his website would have us believe. Oscar Pistorius is an ego-on-stilts with temper issues which, due to his arrogance, inevitably resulted in violence. That’s what his detractors punt on social media sites […]

Posted inMediaNews/Politics

The Oscar Pistorius case: Time magazine is wrong, Lulu is right

Two mainstream media companies have turned the Oscar Pistorius case into an opportunity to ruminate on the perils of post-white rule. Time magazine and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) have both in their recent coverage used Pistorius’s defence to weigh in on the South African “culture of violence”. It is notable that these media companies […]

Posted inNews/Politics

Lynching black men

On March 1 we watched in disbelief and horror as a young Mozambican man, Mido Macia, was forcibly handcuffed to the back of a police van and dragged behind the vehicle as he cried out for them to stop. When the car eventually arrived at the police station eyewitnesses say he was further beaten by […]

Posted inNews/Politics

South Africa and that Time cover

Alex Perry’s story about Oscar Pistorius and South Africa’s culture of violence has inevitably attracted a great deal of attention from the Twittering classes. The general consensus is that the piece, which draws a link between Pistorius’s shooting of Reeva Steenkamp and the endemic violence that characterises our national culture, is poor journalism and full […]