The Ethics of Keeping HIV/AIDS Newsworthy in Tanzania

Abstract

This study focuses on the negotiation of ethical challenges when reporting HIV/AIDS in Tanzania by investigating how two newspapers, the Daily News and the Guardian, operate in an environment with marked limitations on resources. Interviews with journalists reveal how economic concerns and reluctance to invest money in reporting a disease, now perceived as “old news,” has opened up space for official news sources to gain privileged access to disseminate their messages, shaping the discourse on HIV/AIDS. Organizational news sources use many strategies, including providing a “transport allowance” and offering all-expenses paid trips to the field in order to gain media attention, raising ethical dilemmas for journalists and concerns about the quality of the news that gets published.

KEYWORDS:

• HIV/AIDS
• journalists
• media ethics
• news sources
• newspapers
• reporting resources

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2013 Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication conference in Washington, DC.

Notes

1. Ujamaa is a Swahili word for extended family, a concept used by Julius Nyerere to develop social and economic policies after independence in Tanzania.

2. All my respondents were assigned pseudonyms to protect their identities.

Additional information

Funding

Field work was made possible by research grants from Indiana University: the Pre-Dissertation Travel Grant from the Office of the Vice President for International Affairs; African Students Research Fellowship from the African Studies Program; and Dissertation Research Award from the School of Journalism.