Adriaan Basson and his editors at News24 have managed to accomplish something that few outside of politics have ever done.

During the early and mid-2000s, the extent of Muslim-Pakistani rape gangs disembowelling cities and towns across England and Wales began to emerge in reports more fully. The reporting energised the parents of the mainly white, working-class girls who’d been exploited, violated, and trafficked. They’d been dismissed by local councils, law enforcement, and social services, so they thought to approach Westminster, a place they considered the ultimate command authority, who could finally act. But they couldn’t have been more deluded. “Piss off,” the political class told them, “you’re just knuckle-dragging racist inchoates.”

Faced with no other options, the rejected parents, their supporters, and other interest groups formed on the edges then took their grievances to less reputable places for succour, representation, and solidarity. It wasn’t designed to embarrass the establishment, but it did, and when people such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (better known as Tommy Robinson) exploded on the scene, the former’s mood changed from cold to merciless.

The contagion has had a remarkable effect on English politics. Traditional systems have been broken and customs are no longer relevant. The rejected groups have become radicalised – but it wasn’t the raping that did that. Being ignored, scammed, lied to, and punched down on resulted in macabre surrender extending beyond those involved: “If being against the rape of young women makes me racist,” the concerned parties nonchalantly shrug, “then I guess I’m a racist?”

Adriaan Basson’s obsession with AfriMAGArity is doing the same. Increasingly, moderates who possess instinctive social responsibility but don’t like identity politics are eyeing the media strategy as vindictive, factually vacant, and toxically suicidal. This was the wrong group to have gone after. Not because they’re smart or strong. There was just never any need to.

Editorial Policy

When news organisations suffer financial losses, often there’s a change to the editorial policy. Here some see loss as a gap: go after smarter stories, sever dead wood among staff, stop treating your readers as idiots. Ending these problems takes time, but commentary shifts can squeeze admiration from critics, as has happened with both the Los Angeles Times in the United States and The Observer in the United Kingdom (UK) in recent years.

What distinguishes News24 is that while it too is losing (its parent has accumulated half a billion rand in losses in just the last three financial years), unlike media pragmatists elsewhere, it shows no sign of acknowledging the revulsion it generates with its attacks, takes, and hectoring. It persists, convinced that its personal hostility – which it no longer bothers to hide – constitutes “important journalism”. It is at once the most entitled and worst-enabled information platform on the continent.

The neuroticism has resulted in another consequence aligned to the infamous Streisand Effect. Just as the 80s singer Barbra Streisand (Yentl) sued a photographer to remove an aerial photo of her Malibu pad, resulting in thousands of people downloading the same image, so too has News24’s obsession seen the likes of AfriForum and Solidarity heaped with curiosity, none of which has been helpful to Basson and co. Because unlike many political parties, these respective organisations actually deliver for their members.

For inexplicable reasons, News24 and South Africa’s other legacy titles cannot, or refuse to, accept the variables as they appear, and persistently misinterpret the updated criteria for trust. The assumptions that AfriMAGArity must occupy an obstacle or an enemy within the scope of both local and global social justice exaggerates the expectations of normal people, who’ve reduced classifications to simple concepts: is the individual (or group) I see in front of me, a crook, or are they not?

Non-Crooks

Going after non-crooks with the same or even more vigour as real crooks should be grounds to section a reporter under local mental health prescripts. Refusing to acknowledge that AfriMAGArity actually loses in the current framing of genocide and refugee asylum suggests that paranoid fury, not a commitment to truth, stalks these people, and lashing at a diplomat (American ambassador Leo Brent Bozell) for a completely irrelevant crime committed by his child (as Pieter du Toit recently did) is easily this year’s most immature spectacle.

For their part, AfriMAGArity have not just retained their influence, but AfriForum is netting disillusioned former News24 subscribers as new members. The absence of anything resembling a smoking gun in the hyped but hopeless analysis of AfriForum’s financial affairs has caught the attention of black and white South Africans eager to locate the one example of an institution unmolested by looting. In what must be the most otherworldly sequence to emerge here, the platform’s writers, who’ve built their careers exposing corruption, capture, and malfeasance, face up to the antithesis of their work, yet remain bound by an editorial policy determined to see these as the same – when they are obviously not.

This stratagem has ushered in the same sets of conditions present in the divisions prompted by the political response to the UK’s grooming gangs. Ordinary folk, scraping by, who possess no combative intent, find themselves being gaslit, manipulated, and their objections dismissed. Pleas to suspend the bloodletting have been insulted – some resulting in the caution that not supporting President Cyril Ramaphosa and/or the African National Congress as it faces unprecedented scrutiny is tantamount to treachery.

Who knows when this is going to end, but it doesn’t matter. This obsession already ranks alongside The Citizen and the South African Broadcasting Corporation crises as another stain on the industry’s legacy.