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.<\/p>\n
With\u00a0senior staff now openly revolting against Media24, most journalists are\u00a0searching for new horizons in a job market reeling from the\u00a0internet.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So sharing deep thoughts with local\u00a0neo-cons whose articles, full of wishful thinking, are just as short-lived\u00a0as the latest “racist scandal” editors dream up in an effort to cover up the inevitable decline.<\/p>\n
The current malaise<\/em> 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\u00a0week\u00a0China\u00a0picked\u00a0Russia and\u00a0officially recognized the Crimean referendum.<\/p>\n Media24’s official Russia-basher Leopold Scholtz, reporting from the EU,\u00a0was again\u00a0refuted by developments in Germany just days\u00a0ago. He keeps pretending not to notice the earth moving beneath his feet.<\/p>\n So the Steve-and-Dan smear campaign has gained momentum in order not to tackle the large elephant in the room.<\/p>\n A pock-faced jester was even hauled out to spout libel and vile insults, taunting the two Afrikaners\u00a0in the latest desperate attempt to incite racial animosity or whatever it is that will not dig the printed news hole deeper.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Scholtz – his father was historian to\u00a0the architect of Apartheid Verwoerd, ironically – has become accustomed to framing Afrikaners as Nazis in tendentious articles, a distinctly anti-German and Atlanticist\u00a0pastime. 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n A recent\u00a0Der Spiegel<\/em> cover on the G20 read\u00a0“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.<\/p>\n Signed, in an unprecedented move, by Spiegel<\/em> Staff as a whole – hence indicating an overall editorial stance \u2013 the leading article refused to blame Putin for the Ukraine crisis. It instead blamed Merkel, Scholtz’s darling.<\/p>\n Just as Merkel’s political opponents smell victory,\u00a0Germany’s leading weekly equates Merkel’s faults to Putin’s. But the turn-around will not be smooth for Media24, a blind neo-con\u00a0sycophant.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Meanwhile senior German politicians endorsed the Russian annexation of Crimea.<\/p>\n The Anglo-American media retaliated at full tilt, screeching with indignation: “Why Angela Merkel is saying farewell to Ostpolitik”.<\/p>\n Had they been interested in\u00a0journalism, and reporting instead of Russia-bashing and race-baiting, they would have asked some pertinent questions about South Africa, BRICS and Europe.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n From the English press in the country Atlantic subservience is a given and a constant, but Afrikaners thrive on anti-colonialism and independence.<\/p>\n The big cheeses in Media24 would rather like to forget that fact and concentrate on ad hominem<\/em> tags.<\/p>\n How more subservient to the US, and deaf to their\u00a0own readers\u00a0and businesses, can a\u00a0media monopoly become? Especially when Afrikaner farmers are killed by the thousands and white crosses dot the countryside marking\u00a0their torture and demise.<\/p>\n The resentment that Media24’s stubborn Atlanticism and anglophilia arouses among ordinary Afrikaners\u00a0is thus an old story from our concentration camp past from Aliwal North\u00a0to Bethulie,\u00a0Balmoral and the long list of wanton destruction, rape and war crimes by Englishmen.<\/p>\n The news is that even senior politicians and business leaders are now getting tired of Atlanticism, and this may eventually lead to Media24’s\u00a0downfall.<\/p>\n In their\u00a0eagerness to bad mouth Steve and Dan,\u00a0factual errors are overlooked, and outright lies told.\u00a0Ordinary Afrikaners\u00a0inundated the media\u00a0with complaints, calling their reports inadequate, one-sided and biased. But this has strengthened Media24’s\u00a0resolve to find a “racist” scapegoat or two and save their Atlanticist neo-colonial project.<\/p>\n They also attack the increasingly\u00a0economically fragile Afrikaners and accuse them\u00a0of\u00a0militaristic nationalism.<\/p>\n In their deluded, scapegoating\u00a0mood,\u00a0nobody in the crumbling edifice\u00a0wants to address the real issues. That alone\u00a0may go down as a major shift in geopolitics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u00a0senior staff now openly revolting against Media24, most journalists are\u00a0searching for new horizons in a job market reeling from the\u00a0internet. … Continue reading “The geopolitics of South Africa’s puppet scandals”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[492],"tags":[10641,1076,144,12252,51,5801,1343,66,21],"class_list":["post-17063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-atlanticism","tag-brics","tag-china","tag-dan-roodt","tag-germany","tag-merkel","tag-putin","tag-russia","tag-steve-hofmeyr"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17063"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17081,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17063\/revisions\/17081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}