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Tuesday 21 February 2012

Did the SA media go too far?

WAS THE MEDIA UN-AFRICAN ABOUT PUBLISHING THE ILLNESS OF NELSON MANDELA?

When looking back at the oldern days and how Africans used to live and do things, we learn that the illness of somebody was not something to be disclosed in public until it reaches a point of death. Some things were kept private and respected to a certain point


Last year we saw the media splashing the illness of our former president Nelson Mandela in front pages like it was tabloid news. Some were puzzled as to why is the media publishing this information,whereas some felt it was their right to know since he is a public figure and an icon from Africa

Well, times have changed and so has the media. Privacy for public figures has become a thing of the past, but this practice often backfires because they sometimes publish false information and then they get sued. I believe that his illness should not have been published to the public because it was really irrelevent information for us to know, his family needed to deal with this privately and that should have been respected

There are much more serious issues that are affecting our society that the media needs to write about so that the government can attend to and Nelson Mandela's illness is not one of them.