I'm sitting in the HeartsMinds Highway Africa seminar, which is highlighting the media fatigue with HIV and AIDS, that is manifested in various ways:
- An over reliance on 'gray' statistics
- Rewriting of official speeches
- Reporting only on staged events
- A lack of individual initiative by journalists
They say that essentially the result of media fatigue is reporting that is lacking Heart, that it's just another story to be covered. This sees reporters not developing engaging stories, it also results in a situation where editors don't any longer see any reason to run HIV/AIDS stories.
This results in audiences that don't recieve the neccessary information, or at least not in a way that engages them well. The -audiences, too, are fatigued.
Whose fault is it, this fatigue? Let's keep asking those questions.
The content, for one, is lacking in heart, also lacking in useful, engaging info. It's also lacking in creative ways of telling the story. Let's ask these questions!
Solutions to this challenge include finding different angles on human stories, also putting a human face to the story (e.g. journalists should strive to convey feelings, but still remaining objective. Most of all we should always remember that there are human beings behind the statistics).
And what about stories about the challenges faced by sex workers...particulary in the light of the debate around sex workers being legalised in SA in 2010. Approach this journalistically, also remembering that these stories would be about human beings.
Let us, as journalists, also remember that there are no victims of HIV/AIDS...who made them a victim? Let's, as journalists, change our Hearts and Minds in our reporting...let's remember that we're reporting about real humans that, just like ourselves, have real Hearts and Minds.
Journalists get your hands on the HeartsMinds Toolkit, which will help you with your reporting on the epidemic in a way that will help overcome the media and audience fatigue on a subject that MUST be reported on in innovative new ways.
The Toolkit - on a flashdisk - contains, among many others, the SAEF Guiding Principles Ethical Reporting of HIV and AIDS and Gender; also the Kaiser Family Foundation Reporting Manual on HIV/Aids (July 2009 edition).
think-love-act.
(Sitting in the seminar I've been unable to successfully Google the HeartsMinds website address. I'll post it on the blog straight afterwards, as soon as I can track it down.)
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