Targeting South Africa's 'Guy in the Blue Overalls'

Each day, the paper serves up a combination of hilarious and outraged tales of township crime, everyday heroes and good guys trampled by bureaucracy. It offers lots of sports but little politics, unless you count the many columns featuring buffoonish bureaucrats who fail the masses.

"I want pictures of them when they get busted. . . . they're the people's enemies!" du Plessis said at the recent morning meeting, referring to a story stripped across that day's paper about "wicked officials" accused of stealing millions of dollars in a coastal province.

The Daily Sun also features a heavy dose of stories about magic and witchcraft, to the fury of critics who say such articles perpetuate stereotypes of blacks as superstitious rubes.

Du Plessis dismisses that as "liberal intolerance" and retorts with a favorite example. A few years back, he says, the Daily Sun ran a photo of a man lying in his bed atop his roof. The man insisted he had woken up there, next to a white horse, and that wizards had made it happen.

Detractors called it a crock. Du Plessis told them to stuff it.

"It would be the equivalent of me going to the chief rabbi of Joburg and saying that the Holy Spirit is a wizard," he said. "To question that would be another disconnect. It would be another white newspaper in the townships."

Du Plessis is strongly backed on that point by black Daily Sun staffers, including the man he says is his lifeline to the townships, editor in chief Themba Khumalo. Khumalo, 40, who was raised in Soweto, also stood by du Plessis this spring when the paper was investigated by South Africa's national press ombudsman for supporting a deadly wave of violence against foreigners in townships.

The Daily Sun, according to the media watchdog group that lodged the complaint, had fanned the flames by calling immigrants "aliens," in headlines such as "War on Aliens!"

"That was said by people who never really understood the reality of the South African situation," Khumalo said.

Poor black South Africans, he said, had been growing increasingly angry about government failures and job competition from immigrants -- tensions he said only the Sun had covered before the attacks.

Harber, the journalism professor, concurred but added that the Daily Sun was "very slow" to condemn the violence.

In the end, the ombudsman dismissed the charge, agreeing with du Plessis that the term "alien" was technically accurate. But when the ruling was appealed, du Plessis agreed to stop using the word. He's still mad about it.

"Bed-wetters," he called those who complained. "They wanted to do reeducation camps here. They wanted to re-or-i-en-tate."

Hunched over his desk in the Daily Sun's sleek offices, he said he fully expects to be taken on by "activists" again.

He shrugged. He had a paper to put out, one that would hit the next day's newsstands screaming "BEWARE THE KILLER BEES!" and "THIS LITTLE HERO SAVES FAMILY!"

"I don't care if you don't like it," du Plessis said. "I only care if the guy in the blue overalls likes it."

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