Two prominent South African editors broached the issue of good news stories at a conference on the role of the media on Friday. Many government officials, including those at Makana municipality, often accuse the media of only focusing on the bad news and ignoring the positive achievements of government.
Two prominent South African editors broached the issue of good news stories at a conference on the role of the media on Friday. Many government officials, including those at Makana municipality, often accuse the media of only focusing on the bad news and ignoring the positive achievements of government.
Nic Dawes, editor of the Mail Guardian, argued that many good news stories are covered but that readers only remember the negative articles. Ferial Haffajee, editor of City Press more or less agreed with Dawes and said that her newspaper makes a conscious effort to carry good news stories.
As Makana officials have accused Grocott’s Mail of ignoring the good news about our municipal area, we hereby publicly invite them to share these good news stories with us. We often publish positive articles about Makana residents and we joyfully publish good news stories about our area.
The problem is that Makana municipality cannot get its act together about sharing any kind of information with the public. There is so much paranoia about keeping the bad news about corruption and incompetence covered up that the officials do not know how to get even the good news out.
When last did we get a press release about something positive that the municipality has done?
Quite frankly we don’t remember that far back.
In the last five years, Grocott’s Mail has received less than 10 press releases from the municipality. The press release section on the makana.gov.za/ website is completely blank and the website is so poorly maintained that it is an embarrassment.
If we do not find the good news stories from Makana press releases, definitely not on the website, then perhaps we should find them at Makana Municipality Council meetings. The problem with this strategy is that our reporters are regularly kicked out of these meetings, sometimes we don’t receive agendas until the last minute and sometimes we receive no agenda at all. We never receive an electronic version of the agenda.
Meetings are not held according to any predictable schedule and when we are informed that a Council meeting will be held, it can easily be changed without any warning whatsoever, like if the municipal workers’ association (Samwu), wants to have a secret meeting with the Mayor.
We often write good news stories about individual members of the community and about some of the schools, but we are struggling to find good news stories about the municipality.
