To say that popular singer Steve Hofmeyr and author Dan Roodt are targeted by the South African media monopoly, is putting it mildly. They are hounded and smeared daily by paid employees on social media.
With senior staff now openly revolting against Media24, most journalists are searching for new horizons in a job market reeling from the internet.
The only other paying jobs that are not in newsprint are websites flush with Soros money. It thus pays to be a basher of anything sane and conservative.
So sharing deep thoughts with local neo-cons whose articles, full of wishful thinking, are just as short-lived as the latest “racist scandal” editors dream up in an effort to cover up the inevitable decline.
The current malaise is linked to BRICS of which South Africa is a member. Neo-cons tell their stooges in the media giant that America and China will reshape the world order, but only last week China picked Russia and officially recognized the Crimean referendum.
Media24’s official Russia-basher Leopold Scholtz, reporting from the EU, was again refuted by developments in Germany just days ago. He keeps pretending not to notice the earth moving beneath his feet.
So the Steve-and-Dan smear campaign has gained momentum in order not to tackle the large elephant in the room.
A pock-faced jester was even hauled out to spout libel and vile insults, taunting the two Afrikaners in the latest desperate attempt to incite racial animosity or whatever it is that will not dig the printed news hole deeper.
As readers also found out last week, Merkel’s Brisbane speech may actually bring in a major shift in German politics. Afrikaners adore Germans, even though they hate Nazis. A shift from a long phase of Merkel’s undisputed leadership to one where she gets increasingly challenged by furious industrialists, is afoot.
Scholtz – his father was historian to the architect of Apartheid Verwoerd, ironically – has become accustomed to framing Afrikaners as Nazis in tendentious articles, a distinctly anti-German and Atlanticist pastime. But failing to find actual evidence, he has had to invent it with the help of a devious editor from one dwindling sheet called Beeld.
A recent Der Spiegel cover on the G20 read “Summit of Failure: How the EU lost Russia over Ukraine”, making Scholtz’s task all the more difficult to paint Afrikaners as Nazis and rant on about Russian aggression.
Signed, in an unprecedented move, by Spiegel Staff as a whole – hence indicating an overall editorial stance – the leading article refused to blame Putin for the Ukraine crisis. It instead blamed Merkel, Scholtz’s darling.
Just as Merkel’s political opponents smell victory, Germany’s leading weekly equates Merkel’s faults to Putin’s. But the turn-around will not be smooth for Media24, a blind neo-con sycophant.
And just a week earlier, ARD had given 30 minutes of airtime to Putin, who was finally able put forward his views in full before a major Western audience. ARD’s editorial decision was also unprecedented.
Meanwhile senior German politicians endorsed the Russian annexation of Crimea.
The Anglo-American media retaliated at full tilt, screeching with indignation: “Why Angela Merkel is saying farewell to Ostpolitik”.
Had they been interested in journalism, and reporting instead of Russia-bashing and race-baiting, they would have asked some pertinent questions about South Africa, BRICS and Europe.
Scholtz, who fancies himself as an honorary re-educated German, is strangely mum, pointing to the fact that there is no editiorial independance from neo-con manipulation in South Africa.
From the English press in the country Atlantic subservience is a given and a constant, but Afrikaners thrive on anti-colonialism and independence.
The big cheeses in Media24 would rather like to forget that fact and concentrate on ad hominem tags.
How more subservient to the US, and deaf to their own readers and businesses, can a media monopoly become? Especially when Afrikaner farmers are killed by the thousands and white crosses dot the countryside marking their torture and demise.
The resentment that Media24’s stubborn Atlanticism and anglophilia arouses among ordinary Afrikaners is thus an old story from our concentration camp past from Aliwal North to Bethulie, Balmoral and the long list of wanton destruction, rape and war crimes by Englishmen.
The news is that even senior politicians and business leaders are now getting tired of Atlanticism, and this may eventually lead to Media24’s downfall.
In their eagerness to bad mouth Steve and Dan, factual errors are overlooked, and outright lies told. Ordinary Afrikaners inundated the media with complaints, calling their reports inadequate, one-sided and biased. But this has strengthened Media24’s resolve to find a “racist” scapegoat or two and save their Atlanticist neo-colonial project.
They also attack the increasingly economically fragile Afrikaners and accuse them of militaristic nationalism.
In their deluded, scapegoating mood, nobody in the crumbling edifice wants to address the real issues. That alone may go down as a major shift in geopolitics.
