steve: just mean young(ish) white people don’t know that calling someone a kaffir, in the day , as a white person wasn’t a big deal. it wasnt used as a derogetory statement. it was a matter of label. much like one would lable a dog a bitch or bastard. and at the time the average white person didnt think black people deserved their equal rights because they had the feeling this was right , which was self-reinforced in society. the mass of society might be oblivious to it and therefor not know or have a chance of knowing that they are ‘supposed’ to choose something differently. so now that we know that actually calling someone a kaffir is bad it has become a swear word because of the meaning it had at the time. it meant you weren’t one of us, the better ones. Ignorance begets ignorance. they would have bitched about the questioning of this as much as and would have used just as much pressure.

without people like Willem Pretorius and without a situation where he let people like deon maas do their work then we would be left with a broken system like the one. I’m not saying we should dictate what the news media is allowed to cover and how it should react to social pressure. but what we should do as a society is at least figure out a way in which we could counter act ‘unjust’ social pressure. (maybe one could have a fund for a case such as this, where people could contribute towards it, like for instance, a anti-anti-evolitionism media pressure group that would make up the deficit? thereby giving the editor/naspers some form of relief?)

now lets go support media24 , Willem Pretorius and deon Maas. buy buy buy
btw..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards
think the idea of an ethical hotline is quite fun. i wonder if we should tell bush about it

http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_2226725,00.html

hehehehe…

Naspers shares are traded on the JSE. It’s owned by the shareholders. Is that what you mean by public entity? I view it as private ownership, by the shareholders.

I wouldn’t have said much during the apartheid era ‘cos I was too young to understand what was going on. In fact, I only really figured out that there was such a thing as apartheid in my teens, in the ’90s. Shows what an effective job the media (or lack thereof) did.

But besides that, I’m a little confused by your question in the 3rd paragraph. Could you perhaps restate it a little more clearly?

You’re totally free to do business with whoever you want, or not. If that includes not buying Rapport, feel free to do it. But I’d recommend that you take note that if Rapport is owned by Naspers, it’s likely the rest of Naspers’ publications are edited with the same mandate.

I don’t generally buy the Rapport, or any other newspaper, but this incident won’t affect my chances of buying the Rapport measurably. It’ll just hopefully increase my effectiveness at filtering out their slant on news.

your statement that the repport is a privately owned company is wrong, i think its a public entity
i know that nas pers is most definately a public entitiy and i think the repport is owned by nas pers.

but anyway that is beside the point, i just wonder what u would have said , had government not cencored this apartheit suff and had their been a negative reaction towards calling those who used to be called ‘kaffirs’, people of gods creation who deserve equal rights i’m sure that would have resulted in economic oppression of this kind during the height of apartheit sentiment:)

personally , i will never buy repport again not because of the article , but because of the editors preference towards economics than the truth.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/11/creationist_crooks_pilfer_harv.php

My statements are also part of the historic record. What makes it my responsibility not to give my own statements a personal bias?

The influence of the news media is influence we give it ourselves. We can’t blame the media for our own shortcomings.

No, I haven’t read that book by Chomsky, but I’ve read some of his articles, and am totally in agreement that media _does_ have power, and biased reporting is not desirable in principle.

I disagree, however, that any privately owned company has the _responsibility_ to present balanced opinions, unless it’s reporting is illegally biased. Or at least, that their responsibility exceeds any other normal person’s.

And for more on the “censorship” of Attenborough’s documentaries by creationists, see
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/10/dutch-petition.html
Follow the links at the bottom for examples of what they’re cutting. I’ve only watched the first one. Someone loves searching for Johan Kruger quite often. Maybe it’s Johan Kruger checking if I’m talking to him again. So there, I’ve written Johan Kruger. If it’s you, Johan, can you take a look at the comparative cuts of Attenborough’s work, and tell me what you think about it?

Most of the people that comment on this site, me included, would likely call the creationists “liars” for doing this kind of thing. If I understand your position well enough though, and I think I do, I believe your opinion on such matters is that “because evolution is a lie, the cuts made to the documentaries are removing lies”. I.e. you sincerely believe the censorship is performed in order to remove what you believe to be lies. Am I correct?

Thanks.

(And guys, please, don’t fight with Johan Kruger. This battle is mine. I request that you respect that and don’t chase him away with “bullying tactics”.)

i agree tho , that there always will be some form of bias but diversification of opinions heard isn’t always a possibly. (take your apartheit media for example)

have you read norm chomsky’s manufacturing consent? he discusses the current mass media and how it gets manipulated by companies rather than government, in some cases its the government that manipulates the media via the companies. he compares the linguistic meanings of the articles/reports between european and american media and shows awesome examples of how the meanings get completely scrambled .. infact , fundamentalist chrsitains are doing that atm with movies. tv stations get to adjust a cut a couple of minutes from shows (docus and movies) for advertisement placement , so they cut things like ‘billions of years’ and ‘this is due to evolution’. they don’t change anything major , but they do it so that the meanings of what is said changes enough for them to be right.
david attenborough was first for this until he saw one of his movies and noticed how much of what he was saying changed.

The problem is that I am unlikely to believe any state-sponsored newspaper either – the apartheid era illustrates quite well how biased state-sponsored news coverage can be.

So, effectively, I think the key is to be open to any number of sources, and to be aware of the biases inherent due to the target market. Thus, if I want to get both sides of a controversial religious story, Rapport isn’t where I’ll be going.

Independent funding actually sounds like a decent idea, unless someone starts pocketing funds, and starts directing the news to stories likely to attract more funds.

Naah, silly idea. We won’t be able to create that kind of hysteria. Not without resorting to serious lies, in excess of the lies the anti Deon Maas meme depended upon.

Then again, it seems the blogosphere/internet is taking over… I just miss the page-layout.

Rinus, thanks! I read about half of it. (And skipped/skimmed to the end.) Looks good… now back to work with me!