"Gay plague claims more victims" quoth headline-writer at Fairfax

Mark — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:08:10 -0800

Not really, but why should my headlines about Fairfax cleave to a higher standard of accuracy than their own? I accept I might be being a bit over-sensitive to cast this SMH story as homophobic (unlike with the grossly homophobic Sun Herald story a while back), but it's at best hyperbolic sensationalism. First, we had the claim that an HIV-positive man "may have" infected 250 people (currently on news.com.au, but I swear to God that smh.com.au also ran a nearly identical headline yesteray). No-one could reasonably make this extrapolation from the facts, which were that the police were going to talk to every person that the HIV-positive man had been in phone contact with, and that was 250 people. No-one has sex with everyone they speak to on the phone for a month. Seriously. The thing that should be clear from that figure is that there's no way that the man in question infected that many people, i.e. that whatever the number of infected people is, it's got to be less than that. Today we have "Police search for victims of HIV prostitute". Victims? VICTIMS? Are you fucking kidding me? People who have unsafe sex with a prostitute are victims? Seriously, if you have sex with a prostitute, you might want to use protection. I think that's kind of a no-brainer. I don't care of s/he says s/he's a virgin. You know, this goes for people who aren't prostitutes either. Having unsafe sex with anyone at all ever carries a degree of risk. Yes, if they lead you to believe they're safe when they know they're rife with disease, you might be able to claim you're their victim, but not if they're a prostitute. If someone has a financial incentive to pretend that s/he doesn't have a disease you don't assume they're telling the truth. More to the point, if someone you don't know is willing to have unsafe sex with you, then s/he is probably willing to have unsafe sex with other people, hence it doesn't matter what his/her last STD tests said.

journalism

"Gay plague claims more victims" quoth headline-writer at Fairfax