Monday nights can get pretty lonely when you’re simultaneously sans girlfriend and have isolated anyone else who wanted to have sex with you, but I like to keep occupied. So in a brief jog through the internet, I stumble across this little ditty; a clip of former Jacaranda DJ Darren Scott calling up 32-year-old Shaun Dewberry, a self-described “IT Specialist”, from Scott’s new job as a DJ on Ballz Radio. Yes, you read that last part right. It’s a station I was blissfully unaware existed until tonight, largely because any station that thinks adding the letter “Z” to the end of words to indicate something’s “cool” is clearly not targeting me (or anyone born before 1985).
The point of contention between the two parties here is a report by Dewberry (published here) which suggests that NetDynamix, the company responsible for hosting various South African online radio stations at the moment, may be doctoring the listenership figures they provide to these stations. Honestly, I don’t care whether or not NetDynamix is lying to Ballz. I don’t like liars, sure, but what do I know about IP addresses and Facebook pages? I still can’t tell which way the flashdrive goes into this cockamamey thing!
What I do know about, however, is bullying. And man, I ain’t never seen bullying like the time the guy who called a black man “kaffer” in post-apartheid South Africa (2011!!) went after the guy who wrote a report on his blog.
So… Shaun Dewberry is, as far as I know, a motherfucking nobody. Maybe, like most of us, he wants to be somebody. Maybe he just wants to maintain an upward-facing graph of successes so he has something to put in the Win column by the time he’s 50, so he can retire comfortably. Fuck. I don’t know. Maybe he’s an evil pirate Nazi with a parrot-rat mutant hybrid perched on his shoulder, and he’s planning the downfall of online radio so he can swoop in and gather up the pieces of what’s left and turn it into some sort of awful digital Frankenstein’s Monster of old men, past their prime, presenting shows (oh, wait…). Either way, he went out of his way to publish this report of his because, at least according to what he tells Darren Scott when the DJ calls him up, he wants “the truth” out there. I have no idea if his goal is more nefarious than that, but it could be.
I’ll even admit that some of his early stats had me doubting whether or not I wanted to continue reading the report. Dewberry brings up the discrepancy in the amount of followers and fans Ballz has on Twitter and Facebook, respectively, as compared with their supposed listenership. I co-administrate Another-Day and I’ll be the first to tell you we have way less ‘likes’ on Facebook and followers on Twitter than we do daily readers for even just one of our articles. That’s largely because Facebook fanpages stopped meaning anything as soon as you could ‘like’ rubbish like “breathing” or “soft ball”. There may be a parallel apparent between the number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers and listeners tuning into a radio station. Not a direct correlation. Which is what Dewberry seemed to be trying to get at when Scott chose to stonewall him with facts from his days on Jacaranda.
But, you see, Dewberry’s report only use those initial social media stats as a means of explaining his suspicions that something seemed off to him. This prompted his deeper investigation, which led to him digging through how much data the actual servers are trading in, what the servers are capable of handling, and then comparing those figures to the listenership figures provided by/to the online stations. As Dewberry points out, this is based on his analysis of the stats he was able to find. Scott maintains that the station published statistics that reflect the higher listenership figures, but remains deliberately ambiguous about where they’ve been published.
But again, my point here isn’t really about the stats. For all I know, Shaun Dewberry smokes crack when he investigates things, or maybe works for COBRA or something.
“Destroy online radio!”
What I do know is that I’ve never been more disgusted by mainstream media (and with its presenters and use of the letter “Z”, Ballz is straight-up motherfucking mainstream) celebrating an opportunity to pick on the little guy. I honestly started watching this video because I thought it was going to be a light-hearted prank where Darren Scott made fun of Dewberry for a bit, maybe pretending to be someone from NetDynamix, and then had a laugh explaining that in fact Shaun Dewberry missed some vital bit of published data that indicated that, actually, there are more people listening to Ballz Radio in a given hour than there are people on the face of the Earth.
Sadly, I was wrong. Instead, I sat through 9 minutes 10 seconds of a guy in an office calling up another guy he’d never met, cavalierly flipping through his report and doing everything short of calling Dewberry names because he was “wrong” and Ballz was “right”. Oh, this pioneer of mainstream radio also did a fucking ballz job of implying what a tosser Dewberry was for ever even seeking to imply that his pursuit might be the truth, because it was oh-so-obviously a secret capitalist agenda to close down Ballz and 2OceansVibe. I’m pretty sure Darren Scott proved that he can lose a radio job pretty easily without Shaun Dewberry’s assistance. Something I’m sure he’s completely aware of when he angrily calls a guy up, guns blazing, to give him crap over the report he left on his blog.
Maybe Ballz’s listenership will quadruple over this scandal. I know I’ve now heard of them because of this, but that I’m just a minute spike in their listenership because I don’t pay too much attention to radio (let alone one that makes me watch Darren Scott’s mug while I listen). Either way, the message seems pretty clear: Don’t question the big dogs of mainstream media or they will call you and diss you into submission.
Le-fucking-Sigh…