The media often uses specific tactics to drive emotion in order to attract readers. They seem to have no shame in doing this without stating all the facts and certainly do not seem to consider (or care about) the consequences – maybe because there are none. Some of the tactics they use include: (1) using misleading headline, (2) building a one-sided argument backed up with data that does not tell the full story, conveniently leaving out the facts/ full truth, or (3) only stating the real facts/ truth much later in the article. You could argue that there is nothing wrong with point (3) as they do still state the facts. Whilst this may be true, it is a clever tactic. Let me explain the tactic. You create the negative sentiment and strong negative emotions in the first part of the article. This then causes the reader to be too upset to read further or read the rest in a biased manner (filtered by their strong negative emotion). They thus tend to ignore the counter arguments. It is like telling your someone upfront that their wife/ husband is having an affair. The person is likely to get so upset and emotional that if you then tell them that you believe this to be true only because you saw the spouse talking to someone at a function. It may be that this was an innocent conversation, but by first announcing that the wife/ husband is having an affair, you may have upset the person so much that they are no longer able, or interested, in listening to the rest of the story. Their emotions now cloud their judgement and their ability to listen to the rest of the story.
With people being too busy to read long articles hiding the facts at the end of the article could be a convenient tactic hoping that they never get to the end of the article and you have thus driven a specific narrative, first by setting the reader up with your biased headline and then with the first few paragraphs. I give you an example of how this was done, not too long ago.
An article about Eskom’s current leadership appeared in Biznews in August 2021.
This article builds a strong case to show that loadshedding has been the worst since 2007 under the current leadership, but conveniently left out the facts or counter-arguments relating to the reasons for the loadshedding and the accusatory poor performance.
The same information is then rehashed by a more recent article published in MyBroadBand
In the article, the journalist states that SA has endured more load shedding under the current Eskom CEO (Andre de Ruyter) than all his predecessors combined. The journalist even includes the data from the CSIR as proof of this. He builds a strong case to show how things are not looking up for de Ruyter even in his third year at the helm. Later in the article, the journalist does mention that de Ruyter is not fully to blame for load shedding, as he inherited a legacy of issues at the power utility, which includes lack of maintenance (although he seems to allude to the fact that previous CEO’s were not allowed to carry out the same amount of maintenance as de Ruyter is allowed to carry out), increased breakdowns, problematic Kusile and Medupi, corrupt procurement deals, internal sabotage. He concludes by stating that de Ruyter is the first CEO in 15 years to reduce the utilities massive mountain of debt. Very powerful counter-arguments and explanations conveniently left to the end when people have stopped reading or are so negative and too angry to remain open to counter-arguments.
The facts that have been conveniently been left out or understated:
- De Ruyter has only been at the utility for two years, going into his third now – turning any company around takes time, the bigger the machine the slower it moves.
- De Ruyter does not have free reign – he is still controlled by and accountable to government/ parliament. We need to remember that this included politicians that have their fingers in the pie and are driving their own agendas, wanting to see Eskom fail, or are milking the utility through corruption until it fails (remember state capture).
- He has to deal with a mountain of debt – which admittedly he is working hard at and succeeding.
- Nothing can be fixed without money – Eskom has asked for tariff increases, bail outs but most of this has been refused. So how do you fix things without money (ordinary citizens should understand the impossibility of this better than anyone)
- De Ruyter inherited all the corrupt tenders, contracts, and internal staff – firing them may be impossible and takes time. When he does terminate contracts, he has the unions on his back. Many of them may be sabotaging the utility out of anger, spite or for own gain.
- Poor constructed, failing and old power plants – this can not magically be fixed overnight. It is like driving a very old car or be given a defective new car – there is only so much you can get out of it, with no option to just go and quickly buy a new one (no money and one has to build from scratch).
- Renewable energy has been blocked by government so without that to add MW to the power grid the grid will remain under strain with an ever-increasing need for electricity due to our ever-increasing population, free riders and illegal connections that leads to further destruction of the infrastructure.
- Slow procurement processes are allegedly slowing maintenance down.
False accusations: Minister Enoch Godongwana said in an interview with the Sunday Times that load shedding has worsened under Andre de Ruyter’s leadership, stating that he was “allowed” to do planned maintenance and has thus “cut us out of electricity doing planned maintenance”. This is a ridiculous statement in itself as if he has been allowed to conduct maintenance and maintenance is being done, it goes without saying that the units undergoing maintenance will be out of service, leading to load shedding. Furthermore, the statement made by Minister Godongwana that De Ruyter has been afforded the opportunity for maintenance where his predecessors have not, suggest a deliberate decision by government to defer maintenance in the past, which has now exacerbated the problems due to unmaintained power plants.
Black Business Council (BBC) and others have called for the resignation of De Ruyter and the Eskom board without considering the fact and/or the consequences of such a move.