Journalist hooked on making difference in peers’ coverage of HIV

KLAIPEDA - If you were to flip through Lithuanian periodicals in search of anything on HIV, or on the human immunodeficiency virus, you would likely stumble upon vociferous, judgment-charged headlines in relation to the virus and its carriers. Formidable health challenge or life-threatening infection would be probably the mildest expressions you would see.

On the most vivid side of the rhetoric, you will perhaps be carried through the story by more clamorous, and more extreme, journalistic HIV language: a lethal illness, sinful lifestyle and death verdict, just to mention a few epithets that some journalists tend to stamp their stories on the subject with.
“When it comes to covering HIV in the media, there are a lot of misstatements, sensationalism, even intolerance, which all works against the HIV-infected people. Simply speaking, push them deeper into the outcast territory,” says Daiva Ausenaite, a journalist who got hooked on the HIV issue in a strange way - teaching peers how to address the matter.

A butch lesbian and NGO behind the same table
To make the change, she founded a public institution with an intricate name - Information Dissemination Strategy (IDS) - that mostly focuses on raising HIV awareness.
A couple years ago, the public entity was given a grant to carry out the project “About HIV for journalists and the public.”
What Daiva is engaged in most of the time does not probably seem very complicated: she is monitoring HIV-related stories in the Lithuanian print media and she regularly brings together health-issue covering journalists.
In the seminars she organizes, invitees come from astonishingly marginal layers of society: you may see an ex HIV-positive inmate, butch lesbian, drugs addicts, NGO and Health Ministry’s representatives elbowing each other behind a school-desk type table.

They come to talk about the virus and, some of them, about their life with it. Throughout the discussions Daiva may refer to the biggest blunders and gaffes she may have stumbled upon in a recent story on the virus and its patients.
She wouldn’t refer to the journalists by their names, of course.
 
Superstitions still big
“A part of the Lithuanian media tends to portray HIV patients often as big-time debauchers, who engage in shameless insatiable sexual activities, relished with drugs and alcohol. This kind of media representative rarely focuses on HIV carriers’ health issues, their right for free treatment and guarantees of necessary medicine,” Ausenaite says. She adds: “Such a stance only enhances the existing stereotypes and stigmatizes the people.”
The biggest reward for her is witnessing transformation, which, in fact, could be a matter of a couple hours.
“Many journalists come to our seminars believing that the virus is lethal and its carriers are mostly outcasts: drug users, hookers and homosexuals. But in the seminars they quickly find out how wrong with their prejudices and judgments they had been,” Ausenaite noted to The Baltic Times.

“HIV is perhaps one of a very few illnesses which is twined with an abundance of unsubstantiated superstitions, initial judgments and, therefore, fears. Most of the time they are quite unfounded,” says the journalist.
Over 20 years, HIV treatment methods have evolved so significantly that the virus can be successfully subdued from developing into its last – and so far lethal stage, AIDS, she claims.
 
The only HIV-field journalist
Ausenaite, an alumna of Vilnius University’s Institute of Journalism, had juggled different writing jobs before becoming what she calls a “health journalist.” In the Lithuanian print media, the specialization is a rarity even in the biggest dailies, and she is one of them. But her HIV interest narrows it to yet Lithuanian journalistic uncharted field - writing only on the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV.

“The whole issue of health is too wide to grasp the nitty-gritty, professionally. Therefore, with my long interest in HIV problems, I narrowed my focus on the subject,” explains the project spearhead.
She has been writing about HIV over 10 years now. And not only this: with the project under way for two years, she is monitoring and scrutinizing what others produce on the subject.

Covering HIV and HIV patients’ problems is an extremely hard task for a journalist, Ausenaite claims.
“When it comes to quality writing on the matter, very few good and unbiased stories could be found in the pages. Sensationalism, stigmatization and sometimes sheer ignorance prevail. I dare to say that even journalists, who want to sincerely grasp the topic and put much effort into the striving, ultimately find themselves as if talking to the wind, so adverse, alien and repulsive the subject of HIV is for many newspersons, let alone readers,” the journalist asserts.
She says state health policy-makers, instead of contributing to raising HIV awareness, often are deliberately downplaying the importance and threat of the infection.

“Because of them we often see a distorted picture of the HIV situation: the illness rate is purportedly low and HIV patients are ostensibly satisfied with the treatments they receive. None is true,” the IDS head says.
She explains: “The rate is low because the prophylactics programs do not work so well, like, for example, in Estonia, where over 8 thousand HIV carriers have been diagnosed. In other words, Estonians have worked out so effective HIV education and HIV testing programs that most of the carriers were diagnosed with HIV in initial stages. In Lithuania, however, we don’t have so successful programs, and most HIV patients learn about the virus only in its advanced stages. That is a big problem in Lithuania,” says the project leader.
 
People in the margins
Due to the low rate-induced illusions that HIV is not an issue in Lithuania, she says, not only the patients, but also the whole public have given into them. “Such a relaxed, downplayed stance has turned into large-size HIV pandemics in some countries. I am sure it will hit Lithuania soon if the approach doesn’t change,” Ausenaite says. She also encourages journalists to take a more critical stance against the complacent state HIV policies.
She says even to seasoned journalists it is hard to delve into the subject of HIV due to its marginality.

“Professor Arturas Tereskinas has come up with another term, describing HIV carriers as people of margins. I really like the expression,” says the IDS leader and goes on: “I guess the expression needs an explanation for some. Do you remember high school notebooks? What is right and normal ones write in the pages until margins, which are left for an incoherent, silly and meaningless scribble. That is exactly what is happening with the HIV carriers: they exist invisibly with their problems somewhere in the margins of the society.”
She says the state –and media! – is making a big mistake deliberately or not closing their eyes before the people in the margins.

“This mentality – the infection does not affect “normal” people, only those in the margins- is very strong and very…wrong. Out of nearly 2,000 HIV carriers in Lithuania, there are many people, who are coming from very respectable regular families, and who themselves are neither a sexual minority, nor a drug addict,” the journalist says.
 
Lithuanians are shy speaking about sex
“Even if we were to sum up all those people that we often consider to be society’s outcasts- drug users, sex workers, homosexuals, ex-convicts, homeless and all other bums – we’d have an army of 50-60,000 people, an entire larger-size Lithuanian town. Do we have a right to ignore them? No,” the human rights and HIV activist says convinced.  She says the public has turned back to a considerable part of its society.

“Particularly to drugs users, as there is a strong notion that all attempts to bring the drug addict back to a normal life will be in vain. In Lithuania, a drug user caught even with a few pills, will go behind bars indefinitely. Not to a drug addiction treating doctor, what the West is mulling to do with drug users in the near future,” Ausenaite notes.
Among the most deterrent reasons why many avoid the HIV subject, she says, is its implication of sex, still a very inconvenient topic for many in the conservative Lithuania.

The NGO head remembers her interview with prominent Lithuanian psychotherapist and sexologist Viktoras Sapurovas.
“He acknowledged to me that his striving to speak of sex education to fifth graders back in the 1990s had led to pupils’ parents’ accusations of sexual harassment. To avoid the charges, he quit the lessons, but he is still convinced that speaking of sexuality and physiological differences in early age helps bypass many problems during the teenage years,” the journalist recalled. She adds: “Besides, keeping your mouth shut when it comes to sex enhances the separation of sex workers, who make up a significant part of the marginal group.”
 
Don’t hurt! Help!
Ausenaite points out that there are many sexual health topics local journalists tend to skip. “Well, maybe only with the exception of heterosexual prostitution. It is enough to write the word in a headline and the story’s success is guaranteed,” she says.
However, she points out, there are some specific sex topics, like inmates’ sexual relationships, that no one dares to take on, though such “unpopular themes”, she notes, bring rewards to Western journalists in different international writing competitions.

“In Latvia, for example, there are over 40,000 hepatitis C-infected inmates who, sooner or later will end up with their freedom and engage in heterosexual relationships. If they do not protect their partners - which is hard to believe they will - the other halves will have the infection transmitted to them. However, I’ve never seen the problem addressed in the Lithuanian media,” says the IDS head.
Still, limited HIV awareness, the marginality of the issue and the rigid state HIV policies, Ausenaite says, have contributed significantly to the fact that the human immunodeficiency virus in Lithuania is being detected in most patients’ bodies at a late stage, when the virus is to shape up into the still lethal AIDS.
The HIV activist agrees that perhaps few journalists like to listen to a peer’s expressions of advice on how to write a story. Even in HIV and HIV patients.

“The bottom line is: write whatever you see has to be written, but remember not to hurt, but help the person you write about. This especially applies to journalists writing stories on HIV,” says Ausenaite.