‘TIMES’ AND LESBIAN SUICIDE BID

Readers following the saga of the despicably callous way the Times of Swaziland group of newspapers has treated the Swazi lesbian couple who declared they were to marry one another will not be surprised to learn that one of them has reportedly attempted suicide.

In August the Times Sunday invaded the couple’s privacy by secretly attending a restaurant party at which the two women declared their love for each other and their marriage intentions to friends. The newspaper then gave readers lurid details of what the two women might get up to in bed together.

Not content with that invasion of the couple’s privacy and human rights the newspaper group later gave space to people to attack the couple. So-called ‘Christians’ went to town about how sinful homosexuals are.

The Times of Swaziland, invaded the couple’s privacy when it allowed Swaziland’s ‘acting traditional prime minister’ Timothy Velabo Mtsetfwa, to threaten the couple that ‘traditional authorities’ would not allow the marriage to go ahead.

It also reported on family members of the couple criticising their choice to marry.

Not content withal this the Times then encouraged the truly anti-Christian body the Swaziland Conference of Churches (SCC) to gang up against the lesbian couple.

And now comes news that the newspaper may have hounded one of the lesbians to try to take her own life as today the Times reports today (2 October 2009) that one of the couple has attempted suicide.

I won’t go into detail of the report except to say that the newspaper felt it had the right (i) to publish speculation that the woman had actually attempted suicide, (ii) speculate why she did it and (iii) inform the woman’s partner of the suicide attempt and then to publish the poor woman’s response to the news.

Many, many times in the past I have written about how journalists in Swaziland disregard their own Swaziland National Association of Journalists code of conduct. Among other things it covers discrimination against minority groups and how to deal sensitively with sexual matters and how not to intrude on privacy.

The Times has failed to abide by so many clauses of the code that it shows to me that the editors and journalists at the newspaper group have no idea what journalism is about.

By a coincidence of timing, the Swaziland Government is trying once again to muzzle the media with a new Media Commission Bill to regulate the media. The government says it doesn’t trust the newspapers to regulate themselves.

Although the real purpose of the Act is to control the media so that they only report what government wants, it is hard to argue that newspapers such as the Times can be trusted to regulate themselves.

The Times has done the cause of freedom in Swaziland a great disservice in its reporting. If the Swazi government goes ahead with the Act, democrats would have to fight it on principle. We should defend freedom of the press everywhere. But that is not the same as defending the Times.

The Times on its present form doesn’t deserve our defence. If it closed down tomorrow we would lose nothing. In fact it might be a blessing, because then there would be a gap in the media landscape for another newspaper to move in and take its place.