YOUR Royal Highness, King Goodwill Zwelithini: This lowly ‘settler journalist’ enjoying life in your kingdom of KZN certainly has no right to question your wisdom.
You have every right to plunge the assegai into the national press for ‘distorting’ your alleged Pongola comments with regards to foreigners, insinuating that your words were to blame for the horrific xenophobic attacks in Umlazi and Chatsworth of late.
Who could have imagined that one’s comments, meant in good faith, would be taken up so literally by unruly mobs just looking for any reason to excuse their own slothfulness and greed?
However, your subsequent comments published in the Mercury on Monday are somewhat worrying for those in my profession: “To boost the sales and profit of newspapers they (journalists) must find lies. To tell the truth, they are the ones who are causing us to kill each other. They don’t love us. They are worse than the apartheid regime.”
Please, please, please qualify that statement (if it’s true) and reassure everyone that you are not subtly telling your loyal subjects that it is now ‘open season’ on journalists as well.
It is not our place to speak for the national press, but community newspaper journalists only aim to be the champions of, well… the communities they serve.
Yes, we are a business. Yes, we do want to sell more newspapers. But if we went out of our way to ‘tell lies’ we would soon face the wrath of the courts, advertisers and readers who would force us to close down.
We want to be entertaining, relevant and useful to the community as a whole.
Our readers approach us, often out of frustration because those charged with spending their money (rates and taxes) wisely do not appear to be doing so in certain instances.
For the umpteenth time, we try to get answers from all sides in an attempt to resolve the situation or just to keep ratepayers properly informed about any progress. But, more often than not, we are just stonewalled.
Please advise us: Do we just turn a blind eye?
