READING BIG BROTHER

Big Brother Africa 2 (BBA2), the television ‘reality’ show that put 12 young people in a house together and asked the viewers to vote which of them should be thrown out, is getting a lot of coverage in newspapers across Africa. That’s understandable, because a great deal of money has been spent putting the show together and if the publicists can get enough people hooked on it there’s a lot of money to be made for the sponsors.

A good deal of the coverage is in countries that have a representative in the house. Only 12 people were chosen and each of them is from a different country. Only countries with people who have money to attract advertisers were allowed to take part.

Swazis were not invited to audition for a place in the house because not enough people in the kingdom subscribe to DSTV, the satellite television company that is broadcasting BBA2. It seems that Swazis are just too poor.

That hasn’t stopped the Swazi newspapers from running articles about BBA2. I don’t quite see why the newspapers bother since hardly anyone in Swaziland is watching the programme.

Of Swaziland’s two daily newspapers, the Swazi Observer has been publishing most articles detailing what’s going on in the BBA2 house and I can see the irony of a newspaper with hardly any readers writing about a television programme with hardly any viewers

Although the Observer has been publishing BBA2 articles for some time now, its daily rival the Times of Swaziland is catching up.

But the problem is both newspapers are too lazy to write their own articles, even though yesterday both of them devoted a page to the latest ‘news’ from the BBA2 household.

What at first look like columns written by a journalist are actually just a bunch of words copied from the Big Brother Internet site.

I say a ‘bunch of words’ because the inept ‘journalist’ who put the page together for the Observer on Monday (17 September 2007) clearly didn’t even bother to read them. Or maybe, he or she did read them but was a bit too slow to understand what the words actually meant. For in Monday’s article the ‘journalist’ left in lines that are clearly ‘hot links’ for people who are reading the stuff on their computers to click onto and leave their own messages.

When you see the words ‘Make your prediction in the forum’ in print on the page of the Observer, it just makes no sense at all. When you see the same words on the Internet you know to click on them and be taken to a page where you write your own comments about the show.

This is just another example of how difficult it is to trust Swazi journalism. What looks like a piece of independent journalism turns out to be copied from a commercial website.

Yesterday, the game was up. Anyone who bought both the Observer and the Times would see that their BBA2 articles were exactly the same. Word for word.

Both articles were about the non-story that there would be no evictions from the house this week. But (and how exciting is this?) the housemates don’t know.

It’s all public relations nonsense of course to try to drum up some drama about the BBA2 show, when none really exists.

I’d rather the newspapers gave us some real journalism about BBA2.

Here’s something they could find out for us. How many Swazis have been sending SMS text messages to the show (at E3.50 a time) and how much profit has the cell phone company MTS made as a result of this?

And what chance does a caller from Swaziland really have in deciding which housemate gets evicted?