REVOLUTION. WHAT REVOLUTION?

I wrote last week about how the foreign media was taking a different point of view to the Swazi press on the two day general strike.

The Swazi press (and radio and television) saw the event as mostly about disruption and violence, whereas the foreign press saw it as a protest in favour of democratic reform.

I criticised Channel S television for exaggerating the extent of the violence and suggested there may have been a bias against the strikers in the report.

But, Channel S is not the only media outlet that exaggerates. I saw this news report from the Nation newspaper in Nairobi, Kenya. Here is the opening sentence, ‘Swaziland, Africa's last obsolete monarch is ripe for a revolution following widespread pro-democracy protests that brought the tiny kingdom to a standstill.’

There’s a wonderful typing error in the paragraph. Or maybe, the king really is obsolete. Perhaps the writer needs to go put more water in his whisky.

Read the report here