Goodbye Carte Blanche
Clive Simpkins asked:
Dame Margot Fonteyn and her ballet buddy Rudolph Nureyev danced beyond the twilight of their careers. She finally created dreadful embarrassment on stage at Covent Garden by managing only three beats of what was meant to be a four-beat entrechat. The once-loyal audience booed them off stage and into retirement. The same should happen to South African media network M-Net’s Carte Blanche TV program.
Everything and every one of us reach a sell-by date. Prescient retailer Woolworths got the plot a long time ahead of their competitors. I believe M-Net’s Carte Blanche TV program now needs to do some serious belly-button contemplation on the same score. It’s out of date, has become unashamedly biased and is hosted by fading fogies. Reinvent it or euthanase it.
Market forces are a-movin’ and new subscription-TV airwaves in South Africa are scheduled to break the M-Net Multichoice stranglehold – and not before time. This will remove the unfair competitive advantage enjoyed by the monopoly. It will also hopefully give executive producer George Mazarakis and his team the required kick in the backside to revisit their rationale for and the positioning of their ailing progeny.
If you want to pitch a program as journalism, then do so. SABC’s Special Assignment is a superb example of genuine investigative TV journalism. But Carte Blanche has degenerated, unsubtly, into electronic tabloid. It sets out sometimes with a misinformed objective in mind and sure as hell doesn’t let the facts get in the way of the subsequently biased program.
Two examples among many, spring to mind. Every now and again, when they’re clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel for a story, they dredge up the tired forty year old Ritalin debate. Quoting self-serving, self-promotional ‘experts’ like Patrick Holford. Or a wannabe-famous, jaded American psychiatrist who takes on his peer group in a desperate quest for his Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of fame. Carte Blanche ‘researchers’, producers, directors and in my opinion pseudo-journalist anchors need to remember the adage that one swallow doth not a Summer make. Just because some over-the-hill shrink takes a contrapuntal stance, doesn’t mean it’s fact. Hell, imagine if President Mbeki and his loyal sidekick, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and their vitamin-punting buddy Mathias Raath got this sort of billing. We’d all become brain-washed AIDS denialists.
The founding tenet in journalism is that you present the facts and leave the audience to draw its own conclusions. If it’s an opinion piece – like this article – then don’t pretend it’s objective journalism. Carte Blanche crossed the Rubicon of credibility years ago. Their present programming is a pastiche of current affairs and fluffy investigation, coupled with headline-grabbing codswallop that’s clearly designed only to boost ratings.
A very recent example is their pathetic foray into consumer journalism with the program on mobile phone charges in South Africa. Over the years, with a number of their ‘investigative’ programs I’ve had an inside track on what’s happened back-stage. In this case, mobile phone per-minute call costs are in fact lower than when the service was introduced in 1994. Pre-paid, introduced in 1996, ditto. SMS rates, ditto. When compared with similar markets (being realistic on economies, demographics, population density and the like) South African mobile phone charges fall into the ‘average’ category. Even when inappropriately compared with developed economy markets, the rates fall into the average zone. ICASA’s report on SA mobile rates was flawed and presented erroneous data. But Carte Blanche used it as ‘fact’. Pre-paid mobile phone users don’t subsidise contract users. It’s in fact the exact opposite. Contract users, whether they make calls or not, are committed to pay a fixed amount per month for twenty four months. Pre-paid users have access to a free telephone service following a tiny initial investment. They don’t have to make a single call. They receive calls free. They have no legal, financial or other obligation to the network provider.
Why did this all not get discussed in the Carte Blanche program? The answer? It did – but it got edited out. Because it would have thrown the flawed ingoing Carte Blanche premise out with the proverbial bathwater.
Perhaps Carte Blanche’s perception genuinely was that the South African mobile phone user was being ripped off. But the interview evidence demonstrated the contrary. So how much better if Carte Blanche management had the balls to report so! It’s a travesty when you masquerade under the guise of journalism only to punt a pre-determined viewpoint and manipulate editing to support your erroneous premise.
May upcoming competitive forces light a fire of integrity and commitment to genuine journalism under the backside of Carte Blanche – or for heaven’s sake, get it off stage!
