Media Watch
Millennium Development Goals - Africa’s report card
In the year 2000, leaders of 189 nations signed the Millennium Declaration of the United Nations, pledging to free their people from poverty, illiteracy and ill-health. This commitment gave rise to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the target date for which is 2015:
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.
Tech to tackle HIV
Tomorrow is International Nurses Day and hardworking nurses in South Africa are not celebrated enough. Those who work in the public health sector in particular are over-worked and underpaid.
