Media Watch
Sowetan’s dangerous factual faux pas
The Sowetan should seriously consider printing a retraction, after publishing misinformation on HIV treatment.
According to an article in Monday’s (7 May 2012) Sowetan on the sensitive subject of ARV shortages in Limpopo, patients who are struggling to access ARVs can and are “switching from ARVs to AZTs, which are easily available”.
In reality AZT or ZDV (otherwise known as Zidovudine) is actually one ARV that is used in some treatment regimens. AZT cannot be used to treat HIV on it’s own but is used in combination with other ARVs to control HIV infection.
The snip makes the cut
A fair quantity of HIV news coverage this week was dedicated to male circumcision.
“The snip” appears to have been in the headlines for two reasons—First, the cut-off time to register cultural circumcision schools with the Limpopo authorities lapsed this week; and second, health minister Aaron Motsoaledi in his budget speech earlier this week announced that his department had performed over 320 000 circumcisions since February 2010.
At first glance this sounds very much like news we’ve heard before. But whilst some of the flaws that often characterise coverage of circumcision remains evident in the articles, a degree of sophistication underlines this week’s reports.
Editorial: Engaging your audience
Our journAIDS blogs often take issue with the fact that a great deal of HIV journalism is not as sophisticated as it could be. A great many articles merely provide a run-down of who said what, leaving out critical context and failing to corroborate information, add facts or localise cases.
That said, there is a clear limitation to the degree of complexity that can reasonably be added to an article. Leave out critical context and you disempower your reader. But add too much information (particularly multiple statistics and unintelligible jargon) and your intellectualisation has left your readers alienated.
Get with the programme
An article in the Daily Sun covering a school which allows teen moms to breastfeed during school time, misses out on the chance to help make the government’s new and controversial breastfeeding-only policy workable.
Last year August saw a scramble of media activity with thousands of ‘punny’ boob-based headlines sprinkled throughout the papers.
The occasion? Aaron Motsoaledi’s announcement that government would institute a breastfeeding-only policy; discontinuing the distribution of free formula to HIV-positive moms via public healthcare facilities.
The move has proved to be controversial, with various experts lamenting that if not paired properly with antiretroviral treatment, a breastfeeding-only strategy could in fact reverse the dramatic drop in mother to child transmission of HIV.
However a Daily Sun article on breastfeeding moms at an East London school, which appeared in Wednesday’s (9 May 2012) Daily Sun, seems oblivious to all this hullabaloo.
Oh woe is woman: Balancing personal accountability and gender sensitivity
A headlining article in the Daily Sun reminds us that the media needs to strike a fine balance between gender sensitivity and personal accountability when it comes to reporting on HIV.
Media coverage involving gender and HIV tends to pigeonhole men and women into neatly separated binaries of vectors and victims.
An article in last Thursday’s (3 May 2012) Daily Sun is no exception; painting a tragic picture of two innocent and unassuming women being intentionally infected with HIV by an unscrupulous male predator.
Highlighting the ills of structural gender inequality in the absence of personal accountability feeds this predator-prey divide-resigning women to an inescapable pit of powerlessness.
