In the media and in political discourse, obfuscation is the deliberate use of ambiguous, complex, or misleading language to obscure the truth and confuse an audience.

It is employed as a communication tool to hide negative information, minimise accountability, or deflect from core issues.

Unlike simple lack of clarity, obfuscation in the media is a deliberate, conscious effort to blur facts.

It acts as a shield to protect favoured politicians from intense questioning and engineer how the public or stakeholders perceive a situation, often by presenting negative news in a confusing way.

Jargon and technical language is an easy giveaway of media obfuscation at play.

Circumlocution or talking around a subject by providing long, convoluted answers that never directly address the core question is another, and the most common giveaway that obfuscation is at play.

The passive voice can hide responsibility. Constructing sentences that remove a key actor from an action by, for example, saying mistakes were made rather than explicitly identifying the most authoritative figure with power over such a decision, is another.

Employing non-committal words such as "significant progress”, "exploring”, or "considering" to imply action without providing concrete evidence is another giveaway of deliberate obfuscation.

Earlier this year, Chinese, Russian, and Iranian warships participated in a joint naval exercise at Simonstown in South Africa. The legacy media says President Cyril Ramaphosa, who has massive past close business ties to the Iranian government and its military, under whose leadership Iran was invited into the BRICS grouping, whose foreign minister was dispatched to Tehran shortly after the attacks of October 7th, whose government as late as last week sought to shield Iran at the United Nations from scrutiny over the killing of thousands of civil rights activists, and at whose own electoral conference the Iranian proxy terror group Hamas was present as an honoured guest, ordered the military that Iran was not to attend the Simonstown exercises.

Presumably, given the close diplomatic ties between Pretoria and Tehran, and the extraordinary reversal of South Africa's policy towards Iran such a stay-away order would have represented, the same message was sent to the Iranians via diplomatic channels – it would be very odd if the Iranian leadership had not been told that Pretoria wished its navy to stay at home.

Should such orders and diplomatic instructions have been given, the only conclusion to reach is that the South African military conspired with the Iranian government to stage a coup and that the heads of the South African military should therefore be arrested for treason, while the Iranian ambassador should at the very minimum be démarched.