WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2010-06-08 Time: 21:00:02 Posted By: Jan
[Stick around… S.Africa takes this seriously. People will talk about this weird FIFA world cup for years to come. I still look at this and ask myself whether Bafana Bafana’s matches won’t be rigged or manipulated towards success. I don’t trust these bastards.
Rest assured President Obama is not coming to this because the risk is too great and South Africa’s security apparatus is too useless. Jan]
Jerome Valcke, the under-pressure Fifa secretary general, was unequivocal when asked at the turn of the year why the number of overseas visitors planning to travel to South Africa for the World Cup was down on expectations.
He railed against the “really bad and sad” reporting in Europe, and in particular Germany and England, which, he said, was skewing perceptions of South Africa and harming ticket sales. And that was before a Daily Star front page warned that England fans may be “caught up in a machete race war” in a “crime ravaged” country. That left UK journalists based in South Africa desperately trying to explain to colleagues that the Star’s editorial line was not representative of the British press as a whole.
Security threat
It is beyond question that there are a string of issues surrounding the South African World Cup that are open to legitimate probing. Some are the same ones as those faced by any country hosting a major tournament. Will the venues be ready? What is the level of the security threat? Will visitors be overcharged for tickets and hotel rooms? But, given that this is the first African World Cup and is taking place in a country with a particular history, there are also additional questions. Would the money lavished on new stadiums be better spent on other priorities? Or had winning the right to host a World Cup prompted a leap forward in terms of investment in infrastructure, transport and tourism that simply wouldn’t have happened without it?
But over two years there has been a growing sense in South Africa that some of the reporting from British newspapers in particular has been overly negative and, for some, retained an undercurrent of post-colonial superiority that, followed to its logical conclusion, would ensure that no World Cup or Olympic Games ever took place outside the US and Europe.
Nicola Brewer, the British high commissioner in South Africa who was in London last week ahead of the World Cup, said: “There has been a sense that the tabloids in particular have focused in a rather sensational way on some of the negative stories. I am not trying to pretend that there aren’t problems in South Africa, and nor are the politicians. These things are domestic priorities – crime, health, education. But you need to keep it in proportion and you need a sense of perspective.”
The criticism has been further complicated by the fact that many South African newspapers syndicate a sizeable amount of content from UK newspapers and several are modelled on their British counterparts. The web has also been a factor, meaning that over the top conjecture is given the same weight as finely argued investigation and ensuring that all articles, in all papers are available internationally within moments of being published. Particularly controversial examples are linked to, copied, pasted and passed around while more measured arguments are passed over.
Genuine issues
Yet there has also been a tetchiness to some of the reaction in the South African media and, in particular, from tournament organisers, that suggests an unwillingness to engage on genuine issues that are central to the country’s future.
It is not as though the same South African media that have railed against the foreign press have been slow to question the tournament. In particular, there have been searching questions asked of Fifa, with one newspaper winning a lengthy court battle to be able to reveal the details of the contract between the governing body and the host nation. One tabloid even featured a picture of Fifa president Sepp Blatter on the lavatory on its front page.
Hard on the heels of Canadian outrage at reporting of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, when a pile-up of problems at the start of the games provoked a major row between the International Olympic Committee and sections of the British press, there is a pattern emerging. “What I read in the British papers bears absolutely no relation to what I’ve been seeing in these games,” said the IOC’s director of communications, Mark Adams. Several Canadian papers, and many South African ones, have looked to the London Olympics as an opportunity for revenge. But they may be disregarding the fact that the British press is likely to be as criticial – if not more so – of an event in its own back yard.
Analysis by the media monitoring group Media Tenor suggests that the way in which the World Cup build-up has been reported is not unusual. Analysing 66,446 stories in 195 titles from 37 countries, it showed that the concerns may have been different but that Germany also received a rough ride in the run-up to its tournament.
It is possible that the South African hosts have underestimated the extent to which major sporting events are scrutinised during preparation but tend to enjoy an altogether different appraisal in hindsight.
As William Saunderson-Meyer, a columnist for the Mail & Guardian (the Guardian’s South African sister title), recently wrote: “Dare one predict that the World Cup will be neither miracle-cure nor disaster? Just a marvellous sporting spectacle in an extraordinarily beautiful and hospitable country, enviously watched on television by half the globe.”
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jun/07/south-africa-media-critics-world-cup