You don't have to be a rocket scientist ... but it helps

I wish I had an astronomy telescope powerful enough to spot a minor planet barely visible near Jupiter. It’s called Siyaxuza and is named after a young rocket scientist from Mthatha in the Eastern Cape.

‘Stroesnyannies!

This bombshell is contained in the revered Clem Sunter’s column “The X Factor” on News24’s website. Despite the fact that Clem is wealthy beyond my wildest dreams and certainly rich enough to be eternally optimistic (as only the haves can afford to be), I have always held him in the highest regard — even when his fellow mining magnates in the mid-1990s muttered disparaging things about him in hushed tones in the mahogany hallways of the Chamber of Mines. Don’t forget, when you’re chairman of Anglo American Corporation you get spoken about in whispers.

I’ve read all of Clem’s books and relish any opportunity to hear him speak or engage in cocktail party chit-chat. Though we’ve met on several occasions, he probably wouldn’t know me from Adam, but that’s inconsequential. Clem’s celebrated scenarios on the High Road-Low Road in pre-democratic South Africa and his more recent work with Chantell Ilbury in the Mind of a Fox series have shown the former boss of Anglo to be eerily prescient when it comes to the South African thing.

Why TED has not woken to the phenomenon of Sunterism yet is probably because they too get cerebral constipation when the words “South Africa” are mentioned. Only corrupt politicians and a few off-beat musos come from South Africa. Ah well, c’est la vie, c’est la guerre, telle est l’ignorance, my chinas.

Anyway, it’s not so much the man as what he writes about in his column — and more specifically the implications thereof — that are the subject of this blog. Clem bewails the undeniable and scathing fact that a rural lad from Mthatha can rise meteorically to become a genuine rocket scientist without our media so much as cocking an inquisitive eyebrow at it.

“Our media is very bad at celebrating excellence, even when we have a rocket-scientist in our midst!” he writes and, once again, Sunter is spot on. We do a good enough job of highlighting the chawbs in society — most of it of course squirting forth from the clowns in the ANC (a la The Z at yesterday’s AU Economic yackety-yack show). And that is right; morally and by sheer volume of stupidity.

But the sustained abysmal state of South African newsrooms continues to boggle my mind — especially having lived in the US for the past four months. That a story of this magnitude can slip through a news editor’s or programme producer’s fingers is unforgivable. Were a local yokel from Moosebum, Idaho, to have achieved what Siyabulela Xuza has done, Conan O’Brien, Oprah Winfrey, Larry King and Ellen Degeneris would be mud-wrestling for the exclusive inside-story — along with 300 newspapers, WKRP in Everywhere and the network TV news channels. Large amounts of money would, as is the American way, be bandied about.

That’s the first difference between top-shelf international journalism and the thing we have in SA, in the driveway on bricks with the rusty chassis and the dandelions growing through the windscreen.

Difference number two is that most foreign media — for all their multitudinous faults — would do a far superior job of covering the story than just about any media in SA — print, radio, TV or e-news. It would be a tour de force powered by the big guns of journalism. The only way SA newsrooms could match those kinds of standards would be to entrust the story to someone like Rian Malan, Marianne Thamm, Chris Roper, Iman Rappetti and a handful of others (most of whom are no longer in newsrooms anyway). Not because they’re famous, but because they’re the isolated towers of talent in a vast expanse of mediocrity that is the uninspiring desert landscape of South Africa’s unimaginative news media today.

And this has not come about because every news editor, or assignments editor, or producer is an arsehole — far from it. Some of them are damned good at their jobs and fighting the frustrating daily trench warfare of gathering and disseminating news with a demoralised, disillusioned and disgracefully underpaid handful of veteran journos surrounded by a burbling broth sputtering away in a range between “mediocre” and “bloody awful”.

That’s probably why our media missed the rocket scientist in their midst. In a world where an intern is assured of a picture byline for a weather report, a reformatted piece of Sapa Grade 7 stuff and a press release from Luthuli House; where it doesn’t matter if the Five Ws and the H are in the last three paragraphs and the spelling looks like your cellphone batteries are going flat on MXit, exceptional stories not handed to you on a plate with a pretty media invitation just get overlooked. Oh, yes, and they must be able to be done by cellphone.

Add to that the monstrous egos of the newby bossfellas (and sheilas) who believe in their papal infallibility — as the adage holds: “If it bleeds, it leads” — and you have the ingredients of a beautifully slushy mudpie.

And it all comes back to crash-happy media managements intoxicated on power, unsure of where they’re going, who hire the cheapest, cut the quest for quality, stuff the editorial standards and toss the truly talented out along with any troublesome old curmudgeons who step on politically sensitive toes. So a career in the inspiring craft of journalism is reduced to churning out the same tawdry copy day after day, leaving it to the subs to make the shit shine while deciding which doef-doef dungeon to hit tonight.

This while managements (and often to their shame, editors) prattle on about how Facebook and Twitter can bring the company’s name into disrepute (whatever that means), where should they diversify next … oh, and make that another double Johnny Walker Black, please.

Where are the specialist beats that were the jealously guarded hallmark of exceptional journalism less than two decades ago? They exist elsewhere in the world in those specialists — doctors, mathematicians, lawyers, scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists, geologists and botanists — who have made it their callings to craft great and eminently compelling journalism. Survey after readership survey proves the new news readers want background, authoritative, analytical and exquisitely interpreted background. But in the face of gallons of gutter drivel and sleaze, any good stuff is just vacuumed up with the bubblegum wrappers in South African newsrooms.

Why aren’t we seeking out the best and the brightest and training them in specialist fields to tell the myriad stories of South Africans who are making extraordinary things happen right before our eyes? Why aren’t we rewarding them like Al Jazeera, Sky, CNN, the BBC even the local Washington Post does? Why are our media seemingly incapable of pushing the bar higher and higher instead of dropping it down to the level of the lowest common denominator — the social ideal heartbeat of ANC-style communist centralism? Where are the Stradivariuses who painstakingly mull over every word and comma? Or is so-called “citizen journalism” and 3-megapixel cellphone the place where the Fourth Estate will go to die?

The tragedy is that the radiant lights of South African journalism, or all races, creeds, origins and which should constitute the Hall of Fame of South African Journalism just aren’t there any longer. And those that stoically stick it out ’til pension day are so few and far between their voices are drowned out amid the cacophony of ordinariness.

I know scores of them in the brain-drain diaspora (where sadly our own young Harvard-bound Mthatha rocket scientist will probably change the world in a few years’ time) and the rest have been put out to pasture as freelancers. You wanna see how it should be done, pick up a copy of Karoo Keepsakes by Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit and see how real talent can transform a ghost town railway siding in the bum of beyond into a mystical dwelling place of awe and wonder. Ditch the dullards who have nothing say and do so day after day, weekend after weekend, and read Chris Roper’s world-class columns, read anything by Johnny Steinberg, Twitter Rian Malan and find out what he’s up to — and if all else fails, Google Marianne Thamm, Mandy de Waal, Katy Chance, Caspar Greeff, Kristin Palitza, Rob Rose, Bruce Cohen or simply most of the classier stuff here on Thought Leader.

My angry diatribe is directed too at the gormless readership/listenership/viewership that stuff their faces with junkfood journalism, the greasy Big Macs of our media, content in their orgy of ignorance, and luxuriating in a bacchanal of the Seven Deadly Sins of “news”.

If a nation of 47-million-odd people can produce only one journalist who can report well on one of the most important and divisive issues of the day — religion — that is a nation in desperate straits. It is an incestuous feeding machine like the Fat Man in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, oblivious of everything and everyone around it — and wouldn’t know a brilliant rocket scientist from Mthatha and his enthralling story until he’s also elsewhere living his dream and eating American pie.

I wish I could see his star — just once; there next to the biggest planet in our Solar System. Pity it took a scenario planner to alert me to it.