Irresponsible Reporting

Tuesday, July 22, 2003
It seems that the laugh fest never ends.

I managed to catch the segment highlighting STD among gays that was shown during the main news bulletin on TV3 today. At first I noticed how clinical they made it out in the beginning. The funny thing was they were referring to the STD cases as though they are an exclusive gay phenomenon. It quickly became laughable when the report began to link it to the prevalence of gays in the community as if straight people never get syphilis or VD or HIV. If what they say is true that 10% of all societies are practicing homosexuals, who would then have a bigger percentage in the numbers that they bandied about when referring to STDs. Gay people don’t get STDs just by being gay. Stupid gay people who don’t practice safe sex get STDs and they are as likely as stupid straight people to get it. To infer that gay people are more prone to get STDs due to their promiscuous lifestyle is just generalization and irresponsible reporting to say the least.

What was even more hilarious was that they even said that the first AIDS patient in Malaysia was a homosexual person. What about the rest? I can truthfully say that the majority of confirmed AIDS and HIV positive patients in Malaysia are intravenous drug users and exclusively heterosexual people who did not practice safe sex. This is evident from the statistics gathered by the Ministry of Health and yet the report suggests that gays are the root of the AIDS problem in Malaysia! As I have voiced out in my previous entry, it seems that gays are the new “scapegoat” of the month. A new group to be picked on while the interest is still there to divert attention from more pressing issues.

Once done with the clinical aspects of STDs among gays, the new segment continued with so called expert opinion on how to avoid turning into a homosexual. I just had to laugh out loud at the ridiculous notion that one could stay true on the path of straighthood by concentrating on their studies and work. Kinda of reminded me of that movie “Jeffrey” where the main character tried to avoid having sex but concentrating on his work but we know how that ended up. It was hard trying to stomach the malarkey that they were spewing out on TV while I was trying to push down the bile that was rising up my throat.

I guess I should be thankful that they didn’t trot out some religious figure to serve up a dish of cold hard guilt or I would have surely lost my dinner right there and then. I guess that to some the idea of “live and let live” doesn’t mean a thing.