In 2005 a major media company with an international presence handed information on the activities of its journalists to an autocratic police state. A few of these journalists were subsequently arrested, tortured, and imprisoned.
One journalist was Shi Tao. The police state is China. And the media company is Yahoo.
Imagine this had been the New York Times?
Judith Miller, a New York Times journalist, went to jail in 2005 rather than reveal her source in the Valerie Plame affair. Here a major media company supported its journalist's right to protect her source.
It is telling that Internet media companies, which spend so much time complaining that George W Bush is undermining freedom and democracy, is doing its own bit to undermine freedom and democracy. Yahoo hands over journalists and sources. Google censors information that offends governments. Cisco sells specialised equipment that allows police states to monitor the net activities of their citizens.
Whythawk does not normally stoop to being a consumer-action journal; however, when the products in question are cell-phone contracts it may be of interest to understand how they stack up against each other.
Cell phone companies have a clear strategy as far as their contract tariffs are concerned: sew confusion as widely as is humanly possible. Ensure that it is impossible, even with a calculator, for all but a few to create a normative set of comparable figures between competing companies. Even Virgin Mobile, which promises simplicity, is anything but straightforward.
After a rather involved set of calculations - about which I shall not bore you - the following table reveals the best contract offerings (post-pay) of each of the cell phone companies in relation to each other. Certain assumptions are made: that the user makes a large number of calls for business purposes throughout the day; that 65% are made during peak periods; that (for Vodacom and MTN) 60% of calls are made to other networks, while (for Cell C and Virgin) 80% of calls are made to others. The prices below include "free" phones for all except Virgin. The phones themselves may vary between contracts but I wasn't going to analyse that. If you wish, you may assume that the phone is awful and that you may have to provide your own. All figures are estimates and are provided as is.
Best contract per provider
Charge for X minutes calls / month (including contract fee)
Note that, under all circumstances, MTN is the most expensive, while under most circumstances Cell C is cheapest. Cell C and Virgin don't offer 3G services and have weaker network coverage. More interestingly is that buying large-scale contracts offering vast numbers of minutes included does not actually benefit you. Feel free to dispute my figures and assumptions. As a disclaimer, you use these figures entirely at your own risk. See our terms of use.
"If I was a non-Muslim travelling by plane I would always ask for the halaal meal," says Saliegh Salaam. "Not only will the meal be prepared to a significantly higher standard than other airline food, but ..." he pauses dramatically, "you get fed first." And he laughs uproariously and contagiously.
Salaam is the head of equities at Futuregrowth, a South African-based asset management firm. The Albaraka Equity Fund, of which he is the portfolio manager, was started in June 1992 and is South Africa's first, and one of the world's oldest, Shari'ah compliant funds.
We are at lunch at a Jimmy's Killer Prawns, celebrating the fund's recently passing the R 1 billion (US$ 140 million) benchmark of equities under management. It is also Jimmy's first fully halaal restaurant and the Muslim brokers and fund managers at the lunch are celebrating their community's success and invigorated self-confidence.
There is an African saying that, "When elephants fight only the grass gets trampled." It eloquently expresses the despair that ordinary people feel when the people who claim to represent their interests fight over them.
If you can cast your mind back far enough to August 2001, the world had a different hue. Tony Blair, a major Africanist, was working away at George W Bush – then still considered a buffoon who became the accidental president – and France was sufficiently aligned with Atlantic interests to have placed Africa on the agenda.
Africa, let’s face it, is a mess of conflicting ideologies, bad governments and hideous poverty. Some is the fault of outside meddling, some is self-inflicted, and some arises from the nature of the environment of Africa itself (big weather, big diseases, lots of space).
Parliament is currently discussing the draft Films and Publications Amendment Bill. Khulekani Ntshangase, spokesman for the department of Home Affairs declared, "We prefer the media to regulate itself but in the event that those organisations can't do that, then what?"
Then what, indeed?
Anton Harber, Professor of Journalism at Wits University, speaking on the Moneyweb Power Hour declared: “Every possible media organisation, every editor, every journalist is about unanimous in pointing out that the bill is unconstitutional, unworkable, and would severely damage media freedom ... News media has always, even under the apartheid government, had an exemption from that process on the basis that you can't possibly create that kind of pre-publication of news media. But what this bill does is it takes away that exemption.”
There is no doubt that our government has an ambivilant attitude to the media. President Mbeki is, once again, questioning the right of journalists to discuss issues of the day in ANC Today.
With the instant media world of blogging taking off across South Africa – Amatomu lists 428 blogs who cumulatively post over 250 articles a day – how exactly does the South African government intend to control this?
Or are we heading for a two-tiered system where those literate and wealthy enough to afford Internet access get a different type of news from the rest of South Africa?
With Cape Town about to host the World Newspaper Congress it is time that bloggers make their opinion felt on what the nature of press freedom and free speech really means.
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