We have witnessed different strikes in South Africa but on the 16th August the country witnessed the most violent strike since the end of Apartheid , which it is reported that 34 miner workers at Lonmin Marikana were gunned down by Police after they were violently attacking the police which resulted in 2 Police Officers losing their lives. The strike erupted as the management and the mine workers couldn’t agree on salary increase the workers stopped working and assaulting those who are working while others are fighting for the increase.
This accident saw the South Africa police service turn into the South African police "army" when they shot dead 44 Lomnin platinum mine workers on the 16th of august. A lot of questions were asked about; the usage of live ammunition by the police service; who started firing; who is responsible, and this resulted in the president of the country calling for the commission of enquiry to look at the matter before anyone can entirely take the blame. But it was believed they used live ammunition because the miners were too violent and were over powering all those measures that SAPS tried to use.
Many journalists from and abroad covered the event but on my piece I will be looking to some twitter reporting from South Africa well-known Journalists. On my little research i will be using this journalists, The-Star Journalist Tau Poloko , 702 Reporter Barry Bateman and big media company E-news, they were all covering the event but they tackle and use different reporting skills to this Marikana strike.
As I was going through twitter, I can say Tau Poloko is the one giving too much information about the strike as he is reporting live from Marikana. On his twitter page one can easily tell he is using his account not just a normal citizen but more as a journalist as he tries not to be subjective on the event since it started. He gives out every single detail about the event , he know many people depend on him for updates as he work for big independent newspaper. At the end his twitter usage a tool to cover the event worked as news were easily distributed through social media as many twitter users usual retweet his Lonmin Tweets.
At the other hand E-news as the Broadcasting Media House, it doesn’t give every details about the strike but it gives out all the important details and developments .It doesn’t give every details like Poloko did e.g.on one of Poloko Tweets he tweeted that “women at Marikana are happy because their husbands are back” but E-news only tweeted about the serious issues like “Marikana Miners workers are realeased from Jail”. I think E-news as a channel it doesn’t gives out every detail because journalists working for E-news have already twittered all those things as they are live from Marikana so their job is to report solid news which people will be interested to watch on TV.
Barry’s information is very reliable but what makes him less believable from Poloko is that the latter was at the place when the whole thing happened and Barry entirely depended on his sources for that information, which is not bad at all but it will always be ideal to report from the place and he is more like E-news as he only tweet about the important development of Lonmin Marikana Strike
