CRIME SCARE AT THE ‘OBSERVER’

Have the good folk at the Swazi Observer taken leave of their senses?

If the adverts (see above) they have been running about crime lately are anything to go by the barricades are about to go up at the newspaper’s offices and guns are being distributed to all staff.

An exaggeration? Maybe. But not as exaggerated as the adverts.

The adverts in the Observer want us to believe that ‘Violent criminals have taken over our homes, families and businesses with impunity.’ Really? And where is the evidence for this? Police statistics on crime suggest that all criminal activity remains more or less steady with neither large increases nor large decreases in crime in Swaziland.

But that doesn’t matter to the Observer which implores, ‘Join us to crackdown on all sorts of criminal activity and those who shelter thugs.’

It then asks readers to write in ‘to tell us your story of crime and how you survived.’ Then it wants to know, ‘Should police shoot to kill?’

The advert appeared on 16 October 2007 and promised to publish responses from readers the following Friday. On that day there was only one reader’s letter and even that was unsigned.

Not much of a response to a major campaign to crackdown on criminals.

Undeterred the following Monday they tried again. This time there were five SMS messages and two letters. None of these had the full name of the senders, so we can’t be sure that they are genuine.

One SMS was completely bonkers, ‘Police please kill everyone from aspiring, attempting, suspect, allegedly, conflicts of armed robbery.’ I have copied out the SMS in full. I don’t understand it. Do you?

Is this the best the Observer can do in its campaign? Well, actually yes. The following day they put the advert in again and promised more readers’ responses the next Friday (26 October 2007). But came the day, there were none. It couldn’t have been that they were left out because there wasn’t enough space. News must have been slow that day. In the same day’s edition a whole page was given over to the Observer’s new office in Manzini and another page went to a bakery that is selling ‘healthy’ bread.

Why haven’t people responded to the sensationalism of the Observer? There must be at least two parts to the answer. The first is that readers are far more sensible than the Observer gives them credit for. The second is (I suspect) very few people read the paper and those that do, don’t take it at all seriously.

The journalists at the Observer might like to have a look at Article 18 of the Swaziland National Association of Journalist’s Code of Ethics. It talks about sensationalism and headlines. ‘Newspaper headlines shall be fully warranted by contents of the articles they announce.’ To this we might add ‘adverts for newspaper campaigns should be fully warranted by the facts’.