Not all that the announcer says is the gospel truth

8th May 2015

By: Terry Mackenzie-hoy

  

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Radio hosts are important elements of the broadcast media. They have the ability to influence many people on many topics, and one of the skills of a good show host is being even-handed – showing both sides of a story.

There is a code of practice which requires that radio shows be inoffensive or unbiased and that there be a complaints commission which can be referred to if anybody has a complaint.

But I have a difficulty with most radio show hosts and this is related to engineering-related discussions. It is a job requirement that radio show hosts have a wide general knowledge but, naturally, no person can know everything about everything. Thus, when they discuss engineering, one expects them to make a few mistakes. This is understandable. What is not acceptable (to me, anyway) is the fact that they seem to perpetuate their mistakes and then, even worse, rebroadcast them to the public, who then take on the information as the gospel truth and repeat it until it becomes “public fact”, when, if fact, the truth is very far from what has been broadcast.

Here are a few examples. In Cape Town, there are a number of flyovers which have not been finished – they have been built and terminate in the sky. A radio host recently told the world that the reason these flyovers were not completed was that the architects of Cape Town felt that the flyovers would “isolate the city from the sea” and, thus, construction was stopped.

To believe that a group of architects could wield such influence is breathtaking, but this was broadcast as fact. It would have taken the radio station no trouble to find out the truth – that the unfinished sections were constructed at the time of the finished sections for reasons of construction convenience. The initial building of the flyovers was so disruptive to traffic, owing to a vast amount of scaffolding, that it was decided to build, at the same time, future sections so that road disruption was minimised. Now, today, this will happen since flyovers are not built with vast amounts of scaffolding. This is the story. But not according to the radio host.

Another example. A listener contacted a radio host and asked why electricity load- shedding was necessary. The host said it was to “stop the electricity grid from collapsing completely” and “if the grid did collapse, it would take up to two weeks to restore it”. It would have been a moment’s work to look up on the Internet the duration of all the major power outages since 1965 and to find that no grid collapse has ever lasted longer than three days (except in Auckland, New Zealand, where the power was off for five weeks). But this was not a grid collapse – it was monumental human error. But, because of the radio host, tens of thousands of listeners think that what was said is true – and it is not (oh, and no, load-shedding is to stop grid overload, not grid collapse and no, they are not the same thing by far).

Then there is the origin of the term ‘okay’. The radio host announced that it was a corruption of a West African term or similar. When advised that it was, in fact, from the Morse code --- -.- (OK in Morse), which was the standard test signal for determining the integrity of a transatlantic telegraph cable, the host just dismissed the idea.

Then, of course, there is global warming. One host stated recently: “As temperatures in South Africa increase owing to global warming . . .” Really? In the past 130 years, the average monthly temperature in Durban dropped by 0.73 °C. Cape Town experienced a 0.49 °C temperature drop over the past 114 years, and Port Elizabeth 0.19 °C over the past 130 years. It would have been so easy to check. It may sound as if I am being picky but I think not. Given the fact that “I heard on the radio” is often used as a factual justification, I think the radio hosts should take more care.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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