The BBC’s standards of journalism when it comes to South Africa
Yes, the BBC sent the snooty John Simpson to South Africa to do a bit of parachute journalism and be led around by the white “rights” group Afriforum (since when are they are a credible source?) to come up with this insulting question: “Do white people have a future in South Africa?” Read it here. The main claims of the piece (and a documentary broadcast in the UK on Sunday night) are that the white poor number about 400,000 (that would be about 10% of the white population), that there are 80 “white squatter camps” situated around the capital Pretoria, and that there’s a deliberate attempt on the part of the new government to neglect whites. These reports usually add attacks on white farmers into the mix as if there are direct links between these phenomena. And the BBC did that too. It’s a mashup of all the nonsense Afriforum (and its allies like Solidarity) peddles to whichever local or foreign journalists care to listen. In most of these articles and “documentaries” white poverty is exaggerated and treated as unnatural. All of this is, of course, propaganda and fits in well with the attempts at inventing history or the new victim discourse among white South Africans lapped up by foreign media. More »
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