[imagesource: Thobile Mathonsi / African News Agency]

Everyone has a ‘guilty pleasure’ series they watch, despite the fact that they know it’s total and utter shite.

I once watched close to an entire series of Boer Soek ‘n Vrou so I’m not judging.

As scripted as that show is it’s still more tethered to reality than the Tembisa 10 ‘docuseries’, Baby Trade: Tracking the Truth.

Iqbal Survé, Piet Rampedi, and Independent Media seem to believe that if they tell a lie long enough and hard enough then the South African public will gobble it up.

To a degree they’re right. When Survé held that press conference back in late October there was some support on social media.

Little by little the truth of what those independent investigations into the outlet’s reporting of the story really found has come to light.

Despite Survé’s words, the Press Ombudsman actually found that Rampedi failed to apply the basic principles of journalism and labelled the story a “hoax”.

But he’s come this far and the hole must get deeper. On Monday the first episode of the ‘docuseries’ was released by IOL, titled The Crisis:

The story was at first welcomed for the celebration it should have been but was swiftly thereafter decried as “fake News.”

Without doing any investigation to prove otherwise, the South African media immediately castigated Independent Media and Piet Rampedi, editor of Pretoria News who broke the news.

The burden isn’t on reporters to disprove the existence of the decuplets, guys – it’s actually on Piet to prove they exist.

Anyway, I don’t want to give too much away so off we go:

Human trafficking is real, but that doesn’t in any way prove that Gosiame Sithole had her babies stolen by some shadowy figures.

I particularly enjoyed this part:

There is a complete absence of any official registration of the births of these babies and no record of them at any hospital.

This should have raised questions and led to other media houses delving into the topic.

It did raise questions. That’s how we found out that there were never 10 babies in the first place.

Anyway, I will hand over to this thread from Chris Roper to pick apart more of the farcical reasoning:

The website that put the L into IOL has released the 1st episode of their, *koff, “mini-documentary”, fancifully entitled “Baby Trade-Tracking the Truth”. Here are a few comments on how crass and ineffectual their lies and spin are. But also, how damaging to trust in media. /1

— Chris Roper (@ChrisRoper) December 1, 2021

Never one to let the opportunity to sully a good cause pass, IOL states that all of the episodes of Baby Trade will be released during the 16 Days of Activism campaign.

I think we will tap out.

[source:iol]