Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
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.
