Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
The New York Times has an audience that is interested in these issues. Thus it invests in legal writers, journalists, people who can specialise in reporting on the law. They probably have legal qualifications, perhaps even some trial experience, perhaps they even clerked for a judge at one point. Here, Business Day has two legal reporters. And that’s about it. Independent Newspapers in Gauteng has a couple, but for most media organisations, it doesn’t make sense to specialise in that way. Why send a reporter to a court case that takes an entire day, or week, when that same person can do two or three political press conferences? Why bother when your readership isn’t even that interested in legal issues that don’t directly pertain to what Najwa Peterson was wearing in court that day? – Stephen Groottes at The Daily Maverick, responding to an article on this Blog.
