“Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals” was the first article published on HIV/Aids, when no one even knew the virus yet.
Published in the New York Times on July 3 1981, the article read: “Most cases had involved homosexual men who have had multiple and frequent sexual encounters with different partners, as many as 10 sexual encounters each night up to four times a week.”
The journalist, Lawrence K Altman, assured his readers there was “no apparent danger to non-homosexuals” because “no cases have been reported to date outside the homosexual community or in women”.
More than 25 years later, that “rare cancer” has become the worst epidemic the world has ever seen, killing close to 50-million people worldwide of every race, nation, gender and age.
Through it all, the media have had to learn — often through making deplorable mistakes — how to report on history’s most devastating illness.
Perhaps the biggest historical mistake the media — both international and South African — made was ignoring Aids in the first place.
Because the disease was reported as targeting gay men and drug users in the 1980s, there was very little media attention until 1985, when former United States president Ronald Reagan discussed Aids at a press conference, by which time more than 12Â 000 Americans had already died. He didn’t publicly utter the term “Aids” until 1987.
Politics first
Meanwhile, in South Africa, the media were too focused on the political changes that the country was going through — shifting from an apartheid state to the rainbow nation — to care about Aids.
According to the international Aids charity Avert, it is likely that the severity of the epidemic could have been lessened by prompt action between 1993 and 2000.
“As Aids makes its way to S Africa, citizens reluctant to heed warnings”, was an article published in the Baltimore Sun on October 22 1990.
It read: “Some blacks tend to believe that Aids information is American propaganda to restrain sex. Further others think Aids is a government conspiracy to distribute condoms to control the number of blacks so there will be fewer blacks when South Africa adopts the one-man, one-vote position.
“Moreover some blacks feel that this government or right-wing plot serves to undermine the African National Congress [ANC], whose members have been in exile in African countries with high Aids rates. Besides many black men believe that wearing a condom disgraces them …
“Still other blacks think that Aids is confined to whites, homosexuals, and prostitutes … As of October 1990, only 500 cases of Aids have been reported in South Africa, but research shows that as many as 63Â 000 people may be HIV-positive. Nevertheless South Africa is the only African country that is equipped with the wealth and skills to deal with the Aids epidemic.”
‘First World disease’
Aids was being reported as a “white, gay man, First World disease in the early Nineties”, says Natalie Ridgard, coordinator of the HIV/Aids and the Media Project at the University of the Witwatersrand.
“Aids only really exploded into our consciousness in 2000, around the time Mbeki started questioning the link between HIV and Aids. Only then did it become our own epidemic,” she says.
And once it was our own epidemic, some journalists believe the media had difficulties honing in on what really mattered.
Ridgard says the media’s obsessive reports on Mbeki’s Aids denial and campaigns on the hypocrisy of Peter Mokaba’s death were distracting readers from what was happening to the ordinary person. (Mokaba, a former president of the ANC Youth League, was an Aids dissident and believed that antiretrovirals were “poisonous”. He died of Aids in 2002.)
Media Monitoring Project director William Bird agrees: “There has been little focus on the stories of the ordinary person out there and they’re not being told.”
Journalist and activist Charlene Smith says that advocacy journalism that covered the conflict over the roll-out of antiretrovirals and HIV treatment between the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the national Department of Health — and particularly Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang — was boring.
“Manto [Tshabalala-Msimang] and the TAC? Yawn. It may keep shaking up Manto but it doesn’t advance our understanding of HIV and Aids,” says Smith.
Critical writing
Mail & Guardian reporter Belinda Beresford, who has written on HIV/Aids for six years, says the big mistake journalists made was trying to be balanced and objective and thereby not being critical enough. “Journalists didn’t look at the most controversial issues around HIV and Aids and therefore repeated things that were wrong,” she says.
Smith, who is unsympathetic to the media’s “failures” in its reporting of Aids, is quoted on Mediachannel.org as saying: “[Journalists] are either alarmist, most do no research and they rely on often repeated ‘truths’. They do very little focusing on positive interventions or community work; they give people no idea how to manage the virus; or we take political stances instead of the only one that counts — a people-oriented stance.”
“We should be doing more research, relying less on the internet and more on going out into the field and meeting the researchers and scientists, and people infected and affected,” she says.
Smith’s views are supported by a research conducted by the Panos Institute Southern Africa (an independent information and communication agency based in Zambia).
The 2004 report, titled Lessons for Today and Tomorrow: An Analysis of HIV/Aids Reporting in Southern Africa, found that the South African media’s principle sources of information were official press conferences, wire services and press releases.
“Newspapers hardly generated stories from their own inquiry, making HIV/Aids information colourless and too official, while lacking the voices of those most affected by the pandemic,” it read.
Some of those involved in media believe there have been some positive changes in Aids reporting. Bird says there has been less reporting on “Aids victims”, though many — such as Smith — disagree with him.
“There’s been a move away from victimising and reporting on people who are living with HIV and saying that they’re living and not dying,” he says.
However, the way in which HIV-positive or orphaned children are portrayed in the media has seen very little change over the years, says Bird — papers run pictures of crying children that look “like they’re helpless and dying”.
“But if you actually go to see them [the children] in the township, you’d be amazed at the resilience children show,” he says.
Beresford says there’s been an almost “pornographic interest” in Aids orphans and HIV-positive children as a result of a need to detail the massive suffering of children in Africa.
Picture it
The innocent eyes of an HIV-positive orphan stare out a Kenyan orphanage window. It’s an extreme close-up of the upper half of the child’s face. The other half is hidden behind the window pain. The photo was taken by Agence France-Presse’s Tony Karumba in November 2005.
The caption reads: “A young HIV-positive orphan peers through a window besides his cot at the Nyumbani children home, a hospice for Aids orphans in Nairobi.”
Some photographers say photojournalism has been too politically correct and too “desperate to destigmatise” the epidemic, instead of showing that “this is a disease that kills people”, says Greg Marinivich, photo editor for the weekly Sunday Times .
“We [photographers] have shied away from [HIV/Aids] and that’s why we’ve seen these twee pictures of big-eyed kids,” he says.
Oupa Nkosi, a photographer for the M&G, says photographers have misrepresented who the people living with HIV and Aids are.
He says photographers always depict people with Aids as black people. “I’ve never seen a photographer documenting a white sufferer. It’s misleading and people in townships and at a grassroots level think Aids is only for black people,” he says.
The most daunting challenge journalists face in the future is curing editors and readers’ — and even their own — Aids fatigue.
Cape Times journalist Judith Soal is also quoted on Mediachannel.org, and says: “We are all hard pressed to get our stories into print or on to air. There’s no way the commercial media can devote heaps of space to Aids intervention. A typical editor’s quote will be, ‘I don’t want worthy, give me sexy.’ … Of course there is a way round this; we need angles.”
The constant reporting of HIV and Aids is also draining on journalists. “I stopped writing on Aids for a couple of years because I burnt out. There wasn’t enough support and they didn’t understand how difficult it was,” says Beresford.
So what’s the cure for Aids fatigue?
Ridgard says: “The challenge is to find new ways of reporting on HIV and Aids and to keep it fresh and interesting. Not just these sad, toned stories on poor people. The media must make those people exist beyond their status.”