Toby Shapshak: Pattern Recognition

these games for as long as I have been a technology journalist. I don’t play games in the genre of “first-person shooters”, but I do know lots of mature grown-ups who do. None of them has become violent because they kill aliens in Halo or steal cars in Grand Theft Auto. Millions of people play these games every day. Millions more watch violent movies about rogue special forces operatives who become bank robbers. None of them suddenly begins to burn schools.

I was invited onto an SABC radio show about 10 years ago where an upset parent raved about video-game violence. Do you let your four-year-old watch a cartoon channel, I asked, to which she replied “of course” as if I was an imbecile. I will admit to taking delight in pointing out the hypocrisy of this. Watch half an hour of cartoons and tell me they aren’t filled with a disproportionate amount of (albeit cartoonish) violence and mayhem. Wily Coyote is regularly blown up, as the Road Runner lets him fall off the edge of a canyon and plunge to what would be certain death even for someone with Motsoeneng’s nine lives.

As The New York Times says: “Though exposure to violent media isn’t the only or even the strongest risk factor for violence, it’s more easily modified than other risk factors (like being male or having a low socioeconomic status or low IQ).”

Motsoeneng would understand that last factor particularly well; especially as he tries to dumb down the state media ahead of the local elections in August and tries to hide the huge rise in violent service delivery protests. It’s called censorship.

There is a reason that the SABC is often called “his master’s voice” and Motsoeneng has come to epitomise that old record-label phrase. It is both an insult to the country’s intelligence and a grievous assault on our democracy that he continues to get awaywith it.