HIV reporting – 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.
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.
Raising the dead
The Mail & Guardian this week took us back to the dark ages of HIV denialism by publishing Sam Ditshego’s letter to the editor in which he rehashes the long-since debunked views of HIV denialists.
Ditshego’s tirade could easily be mistaken as something penned nearly a decade ago...
Daily Sun coverage undermines serious issue of ARV shortages
The Daily Sun undermines the issue of ARV drug shortages by presenting purely anecdotal evidence.
The page 5 article in Wednesday’s (2 May 2012) Daily Sun features multiple accounts from people claiming that clinics often run short of life-saving ARVs, which means that patients could default and potentially develop drug resistance.
However these claims remain confined to the realm of the anecdotal because the journalist did not bother to corroborate the complaints by investigating whether or not clinics are indeed running low on drugs.
