Big Issue Cover Fail

It’s been a while since we mentioned the pisspoor (but lovely at heart) SA version of Big Issue magazine (it was October 2017). That’s because my life is a better place without the Big Issue in it.

I have to ask about this month’s cover though:

I see no need for the Antarctic Peninsula(?*) to be exploited. I’m actually with Greenpeace on this one [audience gasps]. But despite this unusual alliance, I am still going to take exception with the Big Issue cover.

Q. Why don’t Polar Bears eat Penguins?
A. Because they can’t get the wrappers off.

Or because one inhabits the Arctic and the other, the Antarctic. They are literally poles apart. And yet this incorrect and profoundly misleading cover is being shown to impressionable kids at traffic lights and road junctions all over South Africa.

And then we wonder why the education system is broken here.

It’s only a matter of time until the Bunny Huggers start using it as part of a misinformation campaign, telling us how OMG! you can’t find a Polar Bear anywhere in Antarctica anymore and how we must give them lots of money before the penguins disappear too.

(I do know that the penguins are disappearing though.)

 

* is it really actually a peninsula though?

That Biased Cover

The Big Issue isn’t a magazine that I read very often. Our political standpoints are far from aligned and while I’m obviously aware of the good work that they do in assisting the homeless, I’m rarely interested in the content and politics of their articles.

This month was different, however.  This month featured opposing columns on fracking in the Karoo (see 6000 miles… passim) from rationalist Ivo Vegter and greenie Andreas Spath. Probably nothing they haven’t already shared in tens of thousands of words on the subject online, but you never know. And so I bought, and I made a Big Issue seller smile. Which was nice.

But oh dear. The progressive stance of allowing a pro-fracking column within their esteemed pages was tempered almost completely by the fact that they chose  put it behind this cover:

Described by Editor Melany Bendix on their website thus:

The illustrated cover features a gas mask-wearing meerkat and his sheepish friends in an imagined post-fracking Karoo setting. “Although this is, of course, a very serious topic, we decided to go with an illustrated and rather ‘cute’ cover to lighten the topic somewhat”

Some of you who may be inactive on the internet over weekends may have missed the fact that I disagreed, and that I tweeted so over the weekend:

But apparently, I was wrong as I got a reply to my tweet from @BigIssue SA:

Ah – the old “making light of the fracking ‘hysteria'” defence, beautifully employed there. And while I agree that people reading the articles will have the chance to make up their own minds, there will be literally millions of others passing through intersections all over the country who will merely see the word “FRACKING” in glorious red graffiti, together with a meerkat in a gas mask, all set against a “post-fracking Karoo” backdrop, for the next four weeks. It’s pretty impressive propaganda, as far as I’m concerned.

And so, dear readers, I have assembled some of the greatest minds worldwide and I am asking them to apply themselves to this issue (NPI). Those minds are yours, my friends. Is this cover biased or is it merely “making light of the fracking ‘hysteria’?

I’d love to hear your opinions.