Edition falls short of M&G’s standards
I have long held the view that your newspaper is, on the whole, the only hard-copy newspaper worth reading in South Africa today. I am afraid, however, that your April 28 edition was nowhere near up to scratch. It demonstrated, to my mind, the general decline in standards of quality journalism and put your publication on a par with The Star and the Sunday Times, neither of which has, for many years, had anything much to say.
The full-page item, a piece by Carl Collison on Professor Linton Kwezi Johnson was, as the writer himself confessed, a rush job; it was dull, lazy and pedestrian, and told us almost nothing of substance, much less gave us any taste of Johnson’s actual poetry, which would have been really interesting. Why not use the rather paltry information gleaned at the interview in a proper article on Johnson, exploring his work, history and criticism? As it was, we came away with nothing of real interest.
Two of your Comment & Analysis pieces also left much to be desired, to the point of sheer boredom and not a little irritation. I look forward every week to this part of the paper, which is usually stimulating and thought-provoking.
The first was “The cruelty of deliberate forgetting” by Ismail Lagardien. It was manifestly uninspiring and poorly structured; the language is rather scattered and, I could not help thinking, quite random. Some of the facts were interesting and indeed disturbing, but they did not really form a cohesive or memorable whole. Perhaps it worked better as a talk where the personality of the speaker could shine through; on paper it reads poorly and should not have been published without proper care and editing.
Second, the contribution by Eusebius McKaiser, “Don’t blame poverty on the poor”, must be one of the most banal ever published, apparently about the arbitrary nature of luck, which we are told, “just happens to you”. What McKaiser was saying can really be reduced to one sentence; everything else was uninspiring. And why do we have to read a personal history of the writer (about one-third of the article) in which he essentially explains why he claims, in his own modest words, to have “an above-average IQ”? Come on, Eusebius! —