Difficulties with balance: Normative contestation, ambiguity and change in reporting AIDS denialism

Abstract

The controversy about policy on HIV/AIDS in South Africa during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki provides an opportunity to study how journalists manage normative difficulties in practice and sheds light on normative change. The politically supported entry of AIDS dissidents into debate and policy-making posed a significant difficulty to journalists in the light of the established norm of balance, which requires journalists to deal even-handedly with the full range of views in a controversy. However, orthodox science and the medical establishment saw the AIDS dissidents’ views as both wrong and dangerous, and progressively delegitimised the dissident view and pushed it out of the public debate. The article traces this process, focusing on the ways in which journalists managed the normative challenge. Some insights about the nature of norms that emerged were that part of journalists’ difficulty is shown to be due to a fundamental vagueness and ambiguity in understandings of balance, which is shown to include two quite different areas of application, identified here as ‘balance of opinion’ and ‘balance of evidence’. Read in the light of the proceduralism of Habermasian discourse ethics, the episode also provides new insight into ways in which broad norms come to be applied in concrete historical circumstances, and how they are adjusted through strongly contested discourses.