part of no part

As the 2016 Local Government Elections approaches, the intensity of political expressions have increased and the confusion among the electorate has been multiplied tenfold. Contending parties and candidates have all kept the nation enthralled with their antics, insults and promises. Some more so than others. But the entire circus masquerade which accompanies each election has counterintuitively tended to collude in obscuring “democracy” from a deeper analytical consideration. After all, politicians screaming insults at each other appears to conform more closely to the consumerist conceptions of  elections as a circus where brands are sold, and eligible voters “buy” a manifesto of promises, which we are asked to blindly accept as democracy. Our media often does not provide an alternative analytical framework through which to consider our elections and instead we are bombarded with uncritical mantras of neoliberalism, obtained from the citadels of Western Colonial thoug...

It has been a bemusing couple of days watching the brouhaha around the SABC unfold. Not that the matter is not worthy of critical consideration but rather because it exposes the underlying and not so invisible hypocrisy of the fourth estate.  Media houses of all hews have been scathing in their criticism of the SABC and how it attempts to manipulate the news in order to further its own agenda while conveniently ignoring the massive log in its own eye. Others have written recently to point out this shortcoming and Jane Duncan was most succinct in her description of the media distortions that emanate from the media`s “love affair with riot porn”. Quoting media scholar Todd Gitlin, Professor Duncan points out that “the media were not simply reflecting the realities of political activism…[r]ather, they were constructing activists as unruly subjects, which systematically undermined activists’ struggles. By doing so, media organisations played an important ideological role, legit...