The recent controversy over the activities of the Dr. Rath Foundation admittedly makes for great news. But it has also provided an opportunity for some remarkable advocacy on the issue by the media.

In our blog last week, Lunga Madlala asked:

…why [is] the media is not powerful enough to discredit Rath? Why is it that the media’s efforts aren’t being felt by authorities, even though the coverage of Rath and his foundation – by Carte Blanche, Fair Lady, the Sunday Times, Health-e and others – has been widespread?

Can the media compel public officials and policy makers to take action on Rath’s illegal clinical trials in Khayelitsha and his other harmful activities?

These questions got me thinking again about the role that the South African media can play in the HIV/AIDS epidemic here.

The main criticism that researchers and media analysts have of the media is that coverage of the epidemic tends to be driven by key conflict events and HIV/AIDS “celebrities”. As a result, the complex and uneven terrain of HIV/AIDS in South Africa tends to get covered quite superficially and inconsistently, as coverage is often not sustained beyond these conflict events.

Another critique of the media has been that the personal stories of the pandemic have been underplayed in favour of hard news (Ida Jooste’s paper investigates this quite thoroughly). Recently, though, the media have done a good job at attempting to fill this gap, with the emergence of some fine examples of human interest stories. The new challenge, however, is to move beyond the polarisation of HIV/AIDS into “news”, on the one hand, and “storytelling” on the other (thanks to Panos for this observation). What we tend to see are human interest stories that lack an adequate socio-economic and political analysis of HIV/AIDS and instead attempt to tell the personal story without this context. This type of story-telling can be damaging in our environment of confusing messages and misleading information on HIV/AIDS.

It’s highly unlikely that news production is going to change much, even with the new challenges that the HIV/AIDS epidemic poses to news making. So, to a certain extent, we are going to have to accept that the nature of HIV/AIDS news is not going to change radically. This we can live with, as long as we also get contextualised, meaningful and interesting features about the pandemic.

So, the media need to find ways to make news more accessible and interesting for their audiences. This does not mean not covering conflict between civil society and government. Instead it means that while covering that conflict journalists should ensure that the reportage, for example, provides accurate information about the science of HIV/AIDS, or describes the reasons for the conflict occuring, and not just the fact that it is. This can all be done within the limits of a hard news story. One of my MA students, who is conducting an analysis of news coverage of the Nevirapine resistance controversy tells me that Jillian Green, health writer at the Star, does this brilliantly. I’m sure there are numerous other examples.

Another way to make HIV/AIDS news more meaningful is by incorporating “media advocacy” into one’s reporting. Media advocacy can be broadly defined as:

…influencing public policy to change the conditions that sustain public health problems. News media play a complementary role to health communication campaigns, in that they specifically promote social change, while the latter promotes behaviour change. (from Wallack & Dorfman)

I think the first time we really saw media advocacy come to the fore was during the landmark Constitutional Court case in 2002. As the court case progressed we saw a lot of reporting on the struggle of HIV-positive pregnant women to obtain access to antiretrovirals (ARVs) to prevent transmission of HIV from themselves to their babies (PMTCT). There was a lot of support in the media for the Treatment Action Campaign and government were, for the majority of the time, reported on unfavourably (see Nicola Spurr’s research on this topic). I do sometimes wonder whether this advocacy came as an afterthought to the actual ‘news value’ of the court case, but no matter, the media helped to win widespread public support for the provision of single-dose Nevirapine (SDNVP) in the public health sector and helped to effect social change.

Fast forward to late 2005 and we see it happening again. Health-e news service is doing a remarkable job at reporting on the illegal and harmful activities of Matthuis Rath and his band of AIDS dissidents. Its reports are being picked up by the mainstream media, such as the Sunday Times and the Mail and Guardian. Its reporting on this matter is a sterling example of media advocacy. While the activities of Rath and the reluctance of public officials to do anything about it no doubt makes good news, health-e’s news reports are attempting to influence policymakers in order to change the conditions that sustain Rath’s continued operations in this country. With so little being done by government or other official bodies we need strong, clear voices on the issue and health-e provides us with exactly that.

Getting government to do something about this is not going to happen overnight, as we have witnessed on numerous occasions. First there was the battle for nevirapine for PMTCT and then the one for an ARV roll out. Now we’re trying to get government to stop AIDS dissidents and charlatans from taking advantage of our climate of denial and stigma and most of all, ordinary people’s desperation. But I have to believe that if media launches a sustained campaign against this man, one which health-e has begun, eventually it will pressure government to halt Rath’s activities. Unfortunately we don’t know how many unnecessary deaths we will have to bear before we get it done. - Natalie Ridgard

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 20th, 2005 at 6:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.