Escalating Sinophobia in SA’s media
IN “Seven Centuries of Slander”, an essay in the current issue of The New York Review, Sarah Lipton reviews two significant new books on the history of anti-Semitism. She concludes that they offer the same lesson: “The well of gullibility has to be primed through frequent repetition, especially with the backing of seemingly authoritative sources.” This places a particular responsibility on socially authorised forms of making public meaning, in particular those that, like the media and the academy, present themselves as operating in the public interest. In South Africa, journalism, like the academy, is frequently animated by a strong sense of its own…