The SABC celebrated itself, and only itself, at the 11th SABC Highway Africa new-media awards last Tuesday night in Grahamstown. It used the one-hour-long awards ceremony to promote shamelessly its new News International service and brag about its apparent excellence and professionalism in journalism. The mere fact that the SABC found it necessary to abuse an awards ceremony as a marketing ploy speaks for itself.
The awards (the excuse used to justify this brazen self-celebration) were fit into a 10-minute slot, if even that long, at the very end of the live broadcast. The audience was very briefly introduced to the finalists in each category, with the camera swerving on to the nominees for a split-second. There was no background info on who they were, what had made them finalists and, most importantly, what their product was all about.
The only clue given to the audience was a still image of the home page and URL of the website the finalists were nominated for, accompanied by a one-sentence description of the project. Surely it would have been interesting to know in a bit more detail what these sites were about, and what made them different and exceptional for their creators to be awarded a prize?
But of course, giving award winners and their projects time on air and the publicity that comes with it would have hardly served the interests of the SABC. Instead of getting more info about excellence in interactive web design, the audience was forced to listen to not only a boring and far too long but also an embarrassing speech by the broadcaster’s head of news, Snuki Zikalala.
Visibly nervous, Zikalala stepped on to the stage, his notes noticeably shaking in his hands, to rattle off his written speech without ever taking his eyes of the paper — this although he could have read it off the teleprompter in front of him and at least given the impression of making eye contact with the audience.
Zikalala had much to say about how wonderful, professional, independent and ahead of its time our public broadcaster is. He clearly believed he could impress the audience by showing off what he thought were the SABC’s most notable achievements to date: apparently the first to have broadcast live from a Boeing, a submarine and the Arctic! Wow, that’s surely rare — but why in the world would this be a broadcaster’s primary aspiration? Surely, quality journalism should be about who gets the news and who gets it first rather than who can broadcast from the oddest locations …
After having been assaulted by presumptuous SABC promotion for about an hour, we were not appeased — as hoped — with a delectable meal. The food served at the dinner function following the awards was so second-rate that a whole group of us left after the starters had been served — an unidentifiable, far-too-sweet soup that my colleague rightly quipped could have been served as a dessert had they sprinkled chocolate flakes on top of it.
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