Watching Verashni Pillay, or indeed Redi Tlhabi, do journalism is like an amateur Instagram advert for a butchery in Tasmania.

A man with a camera walks into the food court in a shopping mall, toward a sheepish-looking boomer with a receding hairline sitting at a table. “Sixteen, mate," the man with the camera yells at the boomer,.“16!” The boomer gaps it but the camera follows him, the man holding it continuing to bellow, “16!” The boomer then walks into a shop, a butchery, and turns around to the camera with his arms open. “Yes, Trevor, I was 16 when I started this butchery.”

Didn’t think it was going to go like that, did you? You expected a whole bunch of other people wearing masks to appear from behind plant displays and incapacitate the boomer, before he started wailing sorry-mate-she-said-she-was-18-on-the-Snapchat-will-never-do-it-again. “Now look at what I have,” the boomer says proudly, pointing out the racks of lamb on display.

Transported to where politics meets media, this is how Pillay, former editor of the late (South African) Huffington Post, is approaching the latest misfortune of the Democratic Alliance (DA).

To recap: John Steenhuisen is likely promised an opportunity to “tell his side of the story”, so he sits down with a man whose name I forget and starts airing some (marginally) soiled laundry, most of which is already known, some of which isn’t.

It's unlikely John knows at this point that the morning after the interview is published, he’ll be lampooned by a columnist on the platform that afforded him telling his side of the story – but that’s just how these things go.

Israeli Funding

What happens next, and bear in mind that progressive quarters in Sea Point are already drowning in conspiracy theories claiming that Israel is funding the March and March movement, is that John’s woeful performance during the foot and mouth crisis is relegated. That was small potatoes: the controversy now is that the DA has been flogging grey computers to government departments, or running a dairy into the ground, or landing self-righteous English Lib Dem guests attending a gay wedding at a military airbase.

That Gupta level of offence and indignation is now underway, thanks in part to the hysteria of Pillay, with calls for a full inquiry into Resolve Communications, whose executive chairman happens to be the DA’s former leader Tony Leon. But until lobbying is made illegal, which is unlikely, given that – when practised responsibly and fairly – it helps governments make informed decisions, Resolve doesn’t appear to have done anything outside its explicitly expressed purpose.

In recent weeks this newspaper has come under fire for – apparently – demonising the DA. The only reason why this impression exists is because of demonstrable loyalty exercised by other platforms, particularly toward President Cyril Ramaphosa, whom these platforms have sought to isolate from more excessive parts alongside or underneath him. Thus, the expectation: independent media must side with opposition to these routines – namely the DA.

It doesn’t work like that. When people do or say dumb things, they must be held to the same level of scrutiny. If a political party’s direction resembles that of failed political parties elsewhere, if that party becomes preoccupied with irrelevant global fads and seeks to govern by vibes, or if that political party risks uniform influence by groups unrelated to practical democratic obligations, then it cannot expect to be given a free pass by people who notice stuff.

Far from being rational or constructive, the DA and its extension profiles are now prompting unwarranted comparisons with Bell Pottinger, the infamous propagandist whose silly little girl bosses dreamed up the “white monopoly capital” campaign.

Here it's helpful to remember that those same white public school girl activists – with country piles to take a load off on weekends – were also big on the whole anti-Donald Trump, pro-Black Lives Matter thing. You could argue – convincingly – that one of the reasons why “white monopoly capital” was so spiky and venomous was because it was being commandeered by millennials furious with their fathers, or unable to get a job on MSNBC.

Wilts

The comparison to Bell Pottinger wilts at the first challenge. But if it is to be dragged lifeless into the challenge of legitimacy, it would find itself competing for attention alongside things like William Gumede’s findings of broad-based black economic empowerment practices and recycling over the course of three decades. But this talk is verboten among the likes of that News24 guy and Pillay, and indeed among polite global high finance. Presenting someone like Mark Carney with evidence that the so-called antiseptic policies he cheered have resulted in an African National Congress (ANC) oligarchy and a hyper-Gini coefficient would not be good manners.

As part of her tenuous scope, Pillay has also taken aim at Victory Research, led by former DA researcher and Business Day writer Gareth van Onselen. Initiating a dog pile on someone who publishes what the public tells him isn’t interesting or clever, it’s just grasping. This is true for another chancer on the periphery of the Pillay/Tlhabi school of analysis, Phumzile van Damme, wankered on conspiracies, who was ostensibly being considered for Ambassador to Norway (Nordics not sufficiently disinformation-ed – clearly – according to South Africa).

That’s what this all comes down to. Inference, twisted hunches, paranoia, and the Potemkin architecture of media function where if something mean is found about the ANC, something mean needs to be quickly found about the DA and its extensions. John Steenhuisen’s greatest crime wasn’t dropping his guts on a website, but feeding into the grievance whirlpool of perpetual useless and igniting flashes on the edges.

It's inherently self-destructive to behave like this. At some point people will start asking who owns the company that pays Tlhabi, or why Van Damme circulates a narrative so unpopular and fake that it got its chief proponent axed by – of all places – the Biden administration. Next thing, an organic Bell Pottinger has appeared from nowhere. You see – play rubbish games, win rubbish prizes. You think it's a paedo, it's actually just a butcher.