*Sowetan must stay out of Bedroom!* * *
Dear Editor, Oops…I feel there are more pressing national issues to be reported by your esteemed Sowetan newspaper and the media in general on the pertinent issues faced by the country and the working class. The *Sowetan* of 25 November 2009, drowned to its worse form of gutter journalism by reporting on the private life of popular SABC presenter Vuyo Mbuli. On the front page of Thursday’s edition of the paper a big headline “*Vuyo girl dumps lover*”. On the previous day’s edition the headline was ‘*Caught with pants down’*. These headline stories sought to project Mbuli as a sex pest who does not respect his marriage and sleeps around with other men’s woman. Emotionally and honestly I sympathize with the boyfriend, but the woman had a choice to make by choosing whom to date or sleep with on that night and when. I suppose! Whether Mbuli and the reported woman were involved in a close relationship or got intimate on that ‘*toxic*’ night, a perfectly natural thing that should be *NO* business of the media and quite frankly, it is not for public consumption. There is no concrete evidence that Mbuli and the woman were ever intimate except for the ‘hypothetical’ imagination of the journalist and the whistle-blower – the woman’s alleged boyfriend or man. For argument’s sake, what if Mbuli had consensual sex with the woman, is that a matter of public interest? What happens in someone’s bedroom is a private matter which does not require any interference by the media including the State. Journalists and editors alike do not write about their bedrooms passionate sessions or sexual relationships! Some of the self-anointed high priest of morality will argue that Mbuli is married and that he should respect the institution of marriage. On that one I will disagree. Under the Capitalist system, marriage is an institution of patriarchal dominance and equally of unpaid labour. What we need to do here is to make a clear separation of marriage, morality and privacy. The fact that one is married is not an automatic license for others to invade and trash upon their privacy. Now Mbuli’s sterling broadcasting career as a news anchor is in tatters. He has been thrown to the media wolves; both his dignity and that of the woman he is alleged to have been involved with have been violated and compromised in pursuit of circulation margins and profits by the media which appears more interested in feeding the public junk stories as if we are residing in America or Italy. The puritanical witch hunt against Mbuli waged by the Sowetan and the liberal media is a typical modern day version of Christian fundamentalist crusades against ‘sin’. Married adults, are treated as though they are de facto sinners and sex pests. This witch hunt reinforces the idea in the public sphere that it is morally wrong for either a man or woman to be sexually intimate with a partner without any material reward. Now Mbuli and his alleged mistress will be victimized and even stigmatized for the rest of their lives. Media’s interference aims at re-engineering society to conform to the capitalist sex ‘norm’ of one man and one woman for life, hence denying the complexity of human sexuality. One of the greatest Marxist female thinkers Alexandra Kollontai once made this observation *“there is no doubt: under communism all dependence of women upon men and all the elements of material calculation found in modem marriage will be absent. Sexual relationships will be based on a healthy instinct for reproduction prompted by the abandon of young love, or by fervent passion, or by a blaze of physical attraction or by a soft light of intellectual and emotional harmony”.* Naturally people transit from one relationship to another, including the journalists and editors. Rarely does it happen that a person keeps their first partner for the rest of their lives. Even the bourgeois laws provides for people to be in a union of ‘property’, divorce and re-marry without imposing a limit. The relationship transitions are always very complex. There is no need for the Sowetan and the liberal media to report on these kinds of stories in a way that besmirch the subjects. The media’s interference in one’s private life will not alter the fact that man and women develop sexual attractions, whether married or unmarried. Allowing the Sowetan and the capitalist newspapers to invade the private life of individuals is a gross violation of privacy. Down with private life news! The media must stay out of the bedroom and Mbuli must be left alone he is old enough to determine who to sleep or not to sleep with. Here is my unknown juvenile obsession with the Sowetan. I am a product of a generation that held the Sowetan in high esteem which even took us to believe it was a propaganda organ of the national liberation movement as led by the ANC (African National Congress) in exile. The Sowetan’s stories or news were so well-captured in narrating the brutality unleashed by apartheid government against the oppressed majority, with militant agitation for popular change and national liberation. For many of my generation in the dusty streets and highly politicized township – Chesterville – it was more than a treasure to read its copies, but it served as a cog for revolutionary activism and involvement in politics. In honesty, the treasure I had for the Sowetan in my heydays is today tempered by a tinge of its direction. The Sowetan and other newspapers they have failed to master the current political events as we pursue with our mammoth task of building a better life for all. The Sowetan should grapple or locate itself within the fundamental grievances of the working class and the poor – this is its readership reservoir. We need Sowetan leading stories around service delivery, huge housing backlogs, corruption in the state and private sector; crisis faced by our education system, the impact of the recession on the poor and other many fundamental stories without chasing circulation margins and profit returns. The Sowetan must be a people’s paper like its predecessor The World. Writing about the private life of Mbuli for a propertyless, homeless and jobless person in Alexandra is pointless and nonsensical. *PS*: We urgently need notes for Thandiswa Mazwai’s song *Lahla* *Umlenze*so as we sing it in sync, can the Sowetan choir work on it? Please advice before the Court appearance of Vuyo Mbuli. Yours sincerely, *Castro Ntobeko Ngobese* -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] .
