Sex, bombs, toy guns and a married man in a Mercedes

We’ve had more than enough of this stupid nonsense! Earlier this month a national newspaper published what has to be one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. Not just stupid – blatantly pathetic, discriminatory and damaging.

So what’s got me so annoyed about it then? Let’s start with the basic ‘story’.

The incredibly efficient (okay, sarcasm apparent) police force in Durban raid a house and drive away with women the journalist declares to be, ‘prostitutes’. In the process our eager journalist reports as if she was on the scene at the time (and maybe she was). She writes almost breathless in tone (excitement comes in many forms, I guess), as if she is filing multiple reports for each section of her newspaper (maybe she is an intern looking for a job?). But what did she write? Here we go:

•  Business section: a businessman was found in the house (most live in houses, I assume).
• Wedding section: he was married (how does she know this?)
•  Agony column and sex advice: he was engaged in an ‘indecent act’ (I suspect she means sex and may need some help from the likes of good old smudged red lipped Dr Eve and her cronies to start moving away from her interpretation of sex as ‘indecent’).
• Legal section: seven ‘alleged prostitutes’ were arrested (yes, they were in the same house).
• Fashion feature: the seven were ‘scantily dressed’ (by whose standards?)
•  Building and construction news: police tore down sections of a building (macho outrage?)
• Health and hygiene section: this was all part of a mission to ‘clean up’ Durban (I’d suggest give the city’s cleaning staff better working conditions and they may stop their strike and do it themselves – unless of course the police really want to clean the streets?)
• Cars and transport section: ‘the’ man was driving a Mercedes (and the journalist knows that it didn’t belong to him either. Is she on an all time investigative brightness high today or does she travel with a list of car registration numbers in her purse, right alongside her fashion bible, Trinny and Susannah’s ‘What not to Wear – the Pocket Issue?).
• Toy section: they found a fake gun at the house (not a good idea for a Christmas stocking this year or ever, so lobby your local toy shops not to stock toy guns).
• Trading section: and then they found a total of R3 000 worth of drugs (not exactly a big haul or worth the ink used to print the story).
• Personals (you know the section I mean?...): There was screaming for joy (alas, not of the kind you may expect, but from the good people in the street – note, I said the good people) and talk of ‘wild women.’
• Terrorism report: and almost finally, the fact that a certain Mr Hans Koekemoer (yes, she had his name too and so do we now), portrayed as a poor but somewhat frustrated neighbour, perhaps even a local hero of the future, who lives alongside the evil house, publically admitted to planning acts of terror (terror is my word - our journalist fails to note the problem in this regard of course). Yes, he did. He said, according to our astute journalist “…I was going to bomb this place or set it alight with petrol….” No judgment made her by our thrifty journo – unlike her references to the women – perhaps she was running close to her word count maximum. Clearly the police were too busy bundling women into the back of their vehicle (yes, our eager scout had a photographer with her too so we can see them doing that – interestingly also a woman) to let dear Hans K know that his utterances may not be totally okay with the law?

So what now?

I have ranted, vented and wasted ink and microscopic layers of my keyboard’s keys telling you about this (just in case you don’t read the Independent on Saturday). I’m not sure what now. I know many of you may be working on issues of this nature, but what can we do to STOP this type of crap journalism and crap police action in our country. It’s sad that stories like this sell papers. It’s sad that our police spend time ‘cleaning up’ when they need to do a whole lot of other things more urgently (that include cleaning up real dirt at times). Does someone have ideas about how we can get this all though to our government and our media? And of course Mr K and his friends in his now pristine (I assume) suburb?