Swazi Media Slammed For Neglecting Real Issues

Despite Swaziland's humanitarian crisis, local newspapers are largely ignoring issues such as poverty, food shortages and HIV/AIDS in favour of reports about crime and bickering amongst political personalities, according to The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA).

MISA's Media Monitoring Project report, 'What makes news, and is the news professionally reported?', funded by the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) and released on Wednesday, also found that news stories were largely restricted to covering one area of the country, and poorly reflected gender diversity.

"It is very hard for us to get a story about what is really happening to the Swazi people on the ground in the local media - they just want to report political gossip; the MISA report reflects that," said Thandi Ndwandwe, a public relations officer for a food aid NGO based in the central commercial town of Manzini.

POLITICS NOT POVERTY

The report surveyed news content during a two-week period in October 2006 and found that national politics dominated content in the country's two daily newspapers, the independent Times of Swaziland and the Swazi Observer, owned by the royal conglomerate, Tibiyo TakaNgwane.

Most of the stories - 26 percent - covered local politics. The second largest category was crime, the subject of 18 percent of stories. Despite Swaziland having the highest HIV prevalence rate worldwide - about 33.4 percent of sexually active adults are infected - just one percent of stories were devoted to HIV/AIDS.

Orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) will constitute 10 percent of the population by 2010, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and their welfare is an escalating crisis in the impoverished country. Nonetheless, OVC and children merited only one percent of stories in the Swazi press.

Judging by local newspaper coverage, Swazis seem to have little interest in the world around them. During the two-week period reviewed, "There were just five stories relating to events outside Swaziland - four from other African countries and one from outside Africa," the report commented. International news was relegated to page seven in both papers, a "world news ghetto", in the words of one Swazi reporter.

STAYING CLOSE TO HOME

The offices of both newspapers are located in the capital, Mbabane, in the northern Hhohho Region, and more than half of all news stories in the two publications originated there.

Humanitarian NGOs have tried different strategies to lure reporters to Swaziland's three other regions, particularly the drought-stricken eastern Lubombo Region and the AIDS-ravished southern Shiselweni Region, to give humanitarian issues a higher profile in the national consciousness: only 5 percent of news stories originated in the Shiselweni Region, and 4 percent from Lubombo Region.

"We try to organise tours to bring journalists to the story. This year we mounted an award for best reporter on a humanitarian story," said Abdoulaye Balde, Country Representative for the UN World Food Programme.

The award would have given the winner an all-expenses paid course in higher journalism, in Johannesburg, South Africa, but so few reporters submitted 'humanitarian' stories - only four local journalists entered the competition - that the awards were scaled back.

SENSATIONALIST GOSSIP

Swazi journalism will have to rise above its emphasis on gossip about local personalities - even political stories usually concern attacks by one politician against another, or a politician's scandalous behaviour, rather than substantive reportage on political or governance issues.

The study found that most stories (51 percent) only had one source, breaking a basic rule of journalism that requires at least two sources to ensure balance and accuracy, and safeguard against bias.

MISA deemed 13 articles "unfit reporting", in which "almost half of the violations occurred in stories about child abuse or gender-based violence, where the report failed to protect the victim, and/or trivialised the event".

A notorious example was a news story about an infant found next to the body of his murdered mother, having apparently lain next to the corpse for hours. However, what the reporter and his editors found most fascinating was that during a medical check-up, the baby was found to be a hermaphrodite, possessing both male and female sex organs. This became the focus of the story, to the ire of child welfare groups, who felt the coverage was a sensationalistic violation of the child's privacy.

Women's rights groups complained of poor reporting on gender-based violence, and this was substantiated by the report, which found "the stories that violated principle clearly trivialised child abuse or gender-based violence. In the case of gender-based violence, the stories were often depicted as lovers' tiffs, with no acknowledgement of the criminal nature of the abuse. It was common for the stories to be told through the eyes of the perpetrator, in such a way as to portray him as a victim, without mentioning the illegality of the alleged actions."

The report also found a corresponding absence of women's voices in news reports - female sources were absent in most news stories under review - and in news reporting and editing.

THE CHALLENGE AHEAD

Rudolph Maziya, National Director of the Alliance of Mayors and Municipal Leaders on HIV/AIDS in Africa, an NGO coordinating the response of urban leaders to the pandemic in their towns, felt reporting on HIV/AIDS suffered from subject fatigue. "Both the media and health NGOs have to find creative new ways to tell the story. AIDS has been in Swaziland for almost 20 years, and the story is the same, and will be for some time."

To energise press reporting on humanitarian issues, Maziya felt that media personnel should recognise that they were personally affected. "The media can come to realise that they are not just neutral reporters, but participants. The media houses will come up with their own AIDS programmes, so that when we call reporters to press conferences, they will already be involved as AIDS activists."