The United States (US) ambassador to South Africa has a pleasant, Hawaiian-island, or Inland Empire road-trip face. His looks are of an era past – Kris Kristofferson (before he got into the Palestine stuff and went a bit mad), Waylon Jennings, piña coladas at 2pm in Palm Desert beside a kidney-shaped swimming pool  – the kind of calm, based Americana you may expect to encounter reassuring Beach Boy Brian Wilson at the latter’s Lake Arrowhead house after the singer had completed another one of his 1980s benders.

But appearances are deceptive; be in no doubt that Leo Brent Bozel III is a very smart man who lives in the present. Dummies don’t confront wholesale media contamination – and win. He did, with his Media Research Centre (MRC) – the results of which reflect today in some of the best podcasts and newspaper columns in the world. Donald Trump tapped him because he wins, because he is an actual conservative, an actual American occupying a role that has featured too many insincere, sly American-European thinkers for too long – none of whom have been remotely effective at building a closer relationship between South Africa and one its largest trading partners.

In the media hysteria at Bozell’s emphatic remarks at the BizNews conference in Hermanus – in the neurotic revenge-for-Rasool reflex – something embarrassing has been revealed. It is all reminiscent of managed decline, surrender, and retreat: our media have become elite Europeans. Of course, they are not – they cannot be – but they’re behaving as if they’re entitled to think as such.

Sleeper Terrorist

Fikile Mbalula, the Secretary General of the African National Congress (ANC), responded to Bozell’s opinion by suggesting that the ambassador may be something of a sleeper confederate terrorist. It has always been impossible to read any comment by Mbalula and not react with the same mortification one would experience accidentally witnessing an elderly man creaming his piles. It is said that men who wear double velour tracksuits are especially vulnerable to bestiality, or five times more likely than a normal human to clog up the toilet of a private jet. At least Mblalula’s predecessor at the ANC Youth League, the amateur pornographer Malusi Gigaba, wrote poetry about Robert Mugabe. At least he did something.

The media’s failure to condemn Mblalula’s statement as – at the very least – unhelpful places it in another bind, something that it could have quickly avoided.

For the last year, critics have accused legacy editors and reporters of being on the take from the ANC. These are terrible allegations without foundation; contrary to what said editors and reporters think, the vast majority of South Africans do not want this to be true. Yet when opportunities emerge to humiliate the smears – such as Mblalula’s comments – they go unseized, and instead we get petulant victory laps over the Akkerland issue, adding gravitas to the suspicion these people prioritise one interpretation of being “right” over being … better. You could even argue that being “right” here was financially motivated: hypothetically speaking, if the Akkerland issue involved some allegedly curious reporting from, say, a “fact-checking” desk, then that wouldn’t be good – even worse if the parent of that “fact-checking” desk was down almost 40% in the last year.

Rhyming

History will rhyme for Bozell. In examining the responses to his remarks and the mania for the démarche, he will note a media landscape littered with the same forces that compelled him to establish the MRC in 1987. There can be no doubt he will have researched local editorial policies relating to international perspectives shaped on the demonstrable lie that the US Republican party presented a “threat to democracy” in no less than three previous elections – and read reports revealing “award-winning” South African journalists, in their personal capacities, describing the US president as a “paedophile” and a “rapist”.

Worse than laziness, last week’s events emphasise once again that our media remains heavily influenced by the behaviour of elite European media. In the US, reporters are compelled to apologise when they spasm into remarks similar to our “award-winning” journalists; in Europe, no such mechanisms to control irresponsible or brazenly false narratives exist – unless you’re the European Union, of course, and you send your standover man Thierry Breton to hound Elon Musk. This explains why today there still exist traces of the dismantled Trump-Russia collusion hoax inside newsrooms, why the continent’s reporters still obsess over Robert Mueller’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in 2019 as if he was Morse-coding with his eyes.

This inspiration of Europe is odd. In the 1990s, it was European multinational firms that bribed ANC profiles into the excesses of the arms deal. America knew what was going on and wanted nothing to do with it. Central to the Europeans’ approach was the brazenly racist theory that ANC politicians were impressionable, or easily persuaded by cash. No European media held the continent’s firms implicated to account.

Unexplored

Bozell represents a departure local media cannot understand. The benefits of enhanced cooperation are potentially astonishing, with positive impacts predicted across society  – from its most impoverished verticals to energy and infrastructure. All of this remains hopelessly unexplored.

Because this is how elites behave. So complacent are they in their examination – so used to outsourcing their judgement to interests at times hostile to ours – that they cannot comprehend what is happening, so default to fits – from insults to boomer scolding to wild conspiracies about mineral exploitation.

So perhaps we could make it easier: America wants to work with South Africa. To enable what could be a sea change in conditions, it has appointed a man done pretending  – done pretending with the fake or pandering or inept diplomacy practised by past officials, done pretending with the idea that the ANC’s liberation success guarantees its reputation in perpetuity.

The patronising suggestion, beloved by people such as South African Broadcasting Corporation-lifer Max du Preez and YouTuber Redi Tlhabi, that Bozell should familiarise himself more with the environment is agonisingly daft. That environment is emblazoned across the world as one of dashed opportunities, hubris, and mischievous alliances. He’s here to try to improve the country’s prospects – not deny us of them, or, like the Europeans, make us stupid.