gay bashing journalism

By Gwen Ansell (an-Advancement of Journalism)

A spectre is haunting South Africa at least, if you believe the front-page headline on the Saturday Star of 14 January. Sharing half the above-the fold space with a lurid (unconnected) photograph, 150mm of four-deck capitals
scream: GAYS LAUNCH BLOOD WAR. A further two decks of subhead proclaims: Hundreds of homosexuals lied about their sexual orientation and donated blood.

The Saturday Star is not the biggest-selling title in land, so not everybody will have read the subhead or the story. But no literate Jo�burger passing a street vendor or a pile of newspapers can have missed that headline.

OK, the purpose of a headline is to advertise the news and attract readers to the paper and the story. And anybody reading the rest of that edition of the Saturday Star would have realised that dramatic news was a bit thin on the ground in that edition. Any capable sub-editor, under those circumstances, knows without being told that his or her mission is to 'sex up' headlines to add missing sparkle.

But reasons are not excuses. And both the headline and the story contribute unforgivably to the stigma against gays and people living with HIV or Aids which all South African citizens have a legal and Constitutional obligation to fight.

And besides that, they miss the real story.

We should all remember last year's ugly contortions by the SANBS as they attempted to deny, refute, explain and justify -- sometimes simultaneously the racist treatment meted out to blood donors of colour. As that story unfolded, it emerged that the SANBS had been economical with the truth about 'using the most up-to-date testing methods in the world' (they weren't) and other risk-related issues.

While the blood service finally folded under pressure and adopted new testing and classification methods, they never explicitly engaged with the real issue around risk. Which is that risky sexual behaviour is neither gay nor straight, nor attached to any specific ethnic group, nor necessarily related to the sexual practices or social behaviour SANBS bureaucrats happen to disapprove of. Whether you give it or take it, front, back, sideways, up or down, with men, women or even your Rottweiler (careful, now!) risky sexual behaviour is having sex without a condom.

That's part of the context for this story. That's the question that should be asked of potential blood donors. To assess risk by labelling donors is without doubt a human rights issue, and gay organisations, human rights organisations and media workers should be continuing to interrogate SANBS about such discriminatory (and unsafe) practices for as long as they persist.

Another part of the context are the current controversies around the status and conduct of some gay organisations and leaders, which might lead to exaggerated gestures, exaggerated claims around numbers of members and exaggerated numbers claimed to be engaged in protest actions and might also contextualise comments made by one organisation about another.

None of this context found its way into the Saturday Star's story.

Instead, readers were told that a 'shocking' 65% of the gay men who donated blood were unsure of their HIV status. If the journalist had dug a little deeper, she might have discovered that the comparably 'shocking' unaware percentage of the straight population is even higher. Likewise, the story quotes GLA on the percentage of gay men (40%) using anal sex. But straights do it too -- if anecdotal evidence from such sources as Cosmo sex surveys and Durex surveys is even partly reliable, quite a lot of straights. Which puts us all, as potential blood donors, in exactly the same risk boat. We should all be asked those questions.

As for the ridiculous device of the 'honesty card', another trait all human beings share is making dumb mistakes about sexual behaviour and then sometimes lying about (or just 'forgetting') them. As Bill Clinton (and he would know about that) pointed out on Friday, most people who pass on the HI virus do so while unaware of their status. Add to ignorance the widespread denial fostered by a climate of stigma, and who amongst us can cast the first stone?

No, the only safe blood-handling practice is not categorising people but rapid, effective testing of individual blood donations before they are added to the pool for transfusions. And this is where the Saturday Star really misses the story.

SANBS spokesperson Gail Nuthard told the paper: 'unless there is a terrible shortage' the red blood cells of first-time donors aren't used. There are interesting implications to this statement. One is that they're thrown away
-- which might explain the shortages (and might be a convenient way to covertly continue rejecting blood from non-white donors). Another is that those red blood cells sit around somewhere -- perhaps untested -- waiting for that 'terrible shortage'. But SANBS claims that it now has this first-in-the-world testing system (the PCR-DNA system, used in the US since
1999) which gives reliable results much more quickly. So what would be the problem with using those first-time donations, even outside an emergency if, that is, they are being reliably tested? (And, incidentally, the meticulous sampling, pooling and tracking process required by the PCR-DNA system would seem to render the category of �first-time donor� far less relevant.)

It's a terrible, Tuskegee Experiment scenario to think otherwise: that perhaps 'risky' blood sits somewhere, untested or tested, waiting for an emergency, or perhaps distributed as supplies to 'risky' communities. Or maybe that -- just as last year -- the SANBS is not telling us the full story about the completeness and reliability of its testing methods and the procedures it follows. Without incisive investigative journalism, we'll never know.

If I had been that reporter, that's where my story would have started to get really exciting, without any need for the sub to sex up the headline.

But that's not what we got. Instead, a defamatory and stigmatising headline condemned all gays as 'waging a blood war'; a sub-head modified this to 'hundred of homosexuals lied' (but nobody even tried to verify the figures claimed); context was omitted and the two real themes -- human rights and what's really going on at SANBS -- were buried.

As a media trainer, I despair. Particularly when another paper in the same group, the Sunday Independent, managed a far more balanced account the following day, so the resources on which to do so were clearly out there. And as a journalist, my shoulders stoop under a bit more of the shared responsibility my profession will bear the next time homophobia claims a victim.

A spectre is certainly haunting South Africa. It's the spectre of shoddy journalism.