UK media bias against white South Africans under fire

Key topics:Claims of UK media bias against white South AfricansBBC World Service framing of asylum and immigration narrativesDebate over apartheid-era figures and alleged narrative distortion.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Simon Lincoln Reader*.There was a saying that went on in some of the more progressive members’ clubs in London toward the end of the last decade: “Not all Brexiteers are racists – but all racists are Brexiteers”.I thought it was vindictive, inaccurate but also pretty cool, so I kept it lying around in the hope of one day paraphrasing it. And no time like the present: “Not all English people hate white South Africans…just all the lawyers, the financiers who’ve pulled up ladders behind them, the creative industry leaders, the lanyard class, the new breed of football supporters, students, activist groups, gilded ageing Daily Mail readers, the political establishment, the media and especially the BBC.”Now, after you’ve subtracted these from the population of 75 million (lol), you’re left with roughly two million English – who don’t hate white South Africans – notably the owners of northern rugby clubs, so thank you, guys.Funnily enough, those same groups of haters always hated the UK white working class, but cooled a bit after Brexit in 2016: reason being, the plebs had shown what they could muster, and it wasn’t pretty. Nobody likes having to pay double for au pairs. So in the run-up to Donald Trump’s first election, working class Americans started getting it and at the same time, oddly, white South Africans too..Read more:.Worldview: Trump's false "white genocide" claims spark outrage in South Africa meeting.A documentary about Coronation Park, ostensibly a majority white favela nearby Krugersdorp, had gone viral in the UK toward the end of 2016. A few seconds in and the editorial politics of the makers announced themselves; you get a sense that after describing the basic geography: i.e. the location, and just as the cameras panned to the shanties, the narrator turned off the microphone and stormed off to kick and spit: “Just look at those people, LOOK AT THEM! REVOLTING ONE-LEGGED PEASANTS ARRRGHHH ARRRGHHH!!”The inference: those people, beneficiaries of politics that prioritized their privilege, their prospects, their wellbeing, had still found themselves adrift, as if they had reverse-engineered extreme luck, and that needed exploring. But the exploration was grounded in an assumption: black people living in similar conditions have genuine excuses; this lot don’t. Hence, they really are The Worst People in the World.The public had already been programmed, thanks to the ANC’s love affair with London and members of society’s creative class composing “I’ve never met a nice South African”, featured on Spitting Image. This was satire that would today, by modern elites’ own guidance, be classed as culturally offensive. (That does presuppose the English accept that white South Africans possess such a thing as culture). Eventually the view that there was something uniquely pathetic about poor white South Africans prevailed, setting the mood for other, no less menacing narratives.Because “she was a racist”In August 2024, the BBC aggressively marketed its own series on Louis van Schoor, a former police officer suspected of killing 39 people in the name of his government, who was jailed in 1991. Van Schoor died in July 2024, before the production was completed, but the scoop appeared to zoom around the fact that when he was released that year, he left behind his daughter in the same prison (she was incarcerated for arranging a hitman to kill her mother and Van Schoor’s ex-wife) because “she was racist”. One country’s heinous crimes, tragedy and implied injustice with fragments of gender discrimination: all for the UK’s viewing pleasure (or confirmation bias).Last week the corporation’s World Service decided, not for the first time, to wade into America’s updated immigration policies. Elites in the UK are evidently fine with their own citizens being maimed by foreign nationals, and they expect nothing less from their American counterparts. The problem they have only emerges when there’s objection to this practice, and even worse, some kind of official recognition.The World Service seized on the number of applications for asylum, noting that 4,499 have been admitted since October last year, and of those, 4,496 were South Africans. Tellingly, the coverage did not bother to inquire about South Africa’s feelings on this issue, but projected its own perceptions (which supersede our own varying angst, apparently). Clearly the idea was to blend Donald Trump and white South Africans into a rendition of George Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein, and the Two Minutes Hate. Those who deny a documented contempt for white South Africans, chiefly farmers, but also ANC policy critics, then defend the English view as being one of liberal balance and moderation. They should be troubled to learn that a week after they’d addressed America’s immigration issue, the country’s World Service was at it again: “Former apartheid minister to serve as South Africa’s Ambassador to the United States” (Roelf Meyer). They didn’t address Peter Mandelson’s past when he was appointed the UK Ambassador to the US, despite multiple scandals, the reason being that he is supposedly liberal – and gay, a form once deeply admired in the country’s newsrooms, but in rapid danger of losing air-miles status due to other contemporaneous obsessions.Not “democratic negotiator”? “Apartheid minister”? Not “democratic negotiator”? Not “ANC member” (which is what he ultimately became) or even “Cyril Ramaphosa’s fly-fishing buddy”? Of course not: such are the under-diagnosed depths of race and identity delusion pervasive in the UK mainstream: that Meyer could have converted to Islam, had a steamy affair with Leila Khaled, adopted Greta Thunberg, starred on the podcast where Ebrahim Rasool called Donald Trump a white supremacist or even been the recipient of an irrelevant honorary doctorate from UCT two weeks ago. It wouldn’t matter..Read more:.UK citizenship for South Africans: Benefits beyond the passport.It takes a sicko to think like this; just like the scene where the narrator stops to expel his impulsive disgust that some white people in South Africa are actually poor or downtrodden too. You can imagine the slender elderly producer typing this rubbish out, closing his laptop, and wiping his brow cheerfully before grabbing his Sudanese intern Musa by a Sierra Leonean slave collar, then leading him to the sauna..*Simon Lincoln Reader was born in Johannesburg. He spent a decade living in London, where he worked in financial services, eventually co-founding investment marketplace Lofotr Investors. He writes a Friday column for The Daily Friend, podcasts twice week and is a trustee of the Kay Mason Foundation, a charity awarding bursaries to young people in Cape Town..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission.

UK media bias against white South Africans under fire

Related Stories

Why Musk’s brilliant corporate playbook has stalled in politics

Mark Oppenheimer: Joburg Bar's undeniable race-based admissions

An Afrikaner in Washington: SA sends its past to shape its future

FT: Donald Trump and the remaking of America’s media order