THE NEWS: FACT OR FICTION?

Often newspapers and publications come under fire for printing the truth when discretion should be the better part of valour. The whole purpose of the news is to inform the public and interested parties of what is happening in the world around them. Sometimes things are better left unsaid, but when newspapers and journalists are compelled to report the news, should they not, at least, get their facts straight?

The following misinformation in post-Miss SA reporting needs to be rectified:

* Lisa van Zyl is not getting married to Darren Scott on Wednesday as has been reported in the Pretoria News and other publications. For one, Miss SA finalists may not be engaged to be married. It's in the rules. Secondly, Lisa has a long-time boyfriend named Ayden, and thirdly when I last heard, Sarah-Kate Seaward was going out with Darren Scott.

* The Sowetan reported that runner-up, Matapa Maila, has entered four times and that her second place was a repeat of last years' result. Firstly, since circa 1999, entrants in the pageant may not appear in consecutive finals. Matapa has been a finalist in 2005 (3rd place), 2007 (unplaced) and 2009 (2nd place).

* Nicole Flint was anything but a "dark horse" in the contest. She was in the Top 5 of most prediction lists around the world. If the publications that have reported this had bothered to establish the facts, they would know that the general expectation was that a finalist of African descent was going to win and that Nicole would get a call-back in 2011. The only surprise was that a "white" girl won the pageant in the year preceding the World Cup.

I realise that pageants are not all the rage, un-PC, irrelevant, outdated and unfashionable, but spare a thought for the hundreds of thousands of girls worldwide that don't care about media opinion and still compete, and spare a thought for the tens of millions of fans, followers and supporters that follow pageants religiously before sucking "facts" through a straw in you nether orry. You might not care about the "facts", but they do.