Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) awards a GLAD[1] to Saturday Star for accessing a child who is portrayed as a hero for saving the life of her rugby coach.
“Trigger-fast pupil saves coach’s life” (Saturday Star, 27/07/2019, p.5) by Keagan Mitchell reports on a grade nine pupil from Sans Souci Girls’ High School, 15-year-old Kyra Stevens whose “quick thinking” and “calm demeanour under pressure proved to be critical in preventing the death” of her coach. According to the article, Kyra was called to the community room of her school where she “took charge” after teachers and the school principal found their colleague had gone into a diabetic coma in his classroom.
The article portrays the child positively and includes a photograph of her standing with her coach with both of them smiling brightly.
The child is quoted extensively in the article. One of the quotes has her saying, “I wanted to check his sugar but and could not find blood in one hand because it was so cold. I told one of the teachers to warm his fingers, and then found blood in the other hand… I then gave him 25mg of insulin. Everyone was in such a panic… I really feel proud of myself for saving [him].”
MMA wants to commend the journalist for showing South Africa that children can also demonstrate critical skills and care towards their teachers. Recently in the South African media, we have seen reports on crisis between teachers and pupils. This article shows that the relationship between teachers and pupils is not always tense and/or violent but that care does exist between them.
We urge all journalists to emulate Keagan Mitchell and help challenge all negative stereotypes involving children especially the ones that suggest children are not active agents. In addition, we urge journalists to take time to access children in order for their voices to be heard in positive articles about them, such as was done in this article.
This great reporting by Saturday Star is perfectly in line with MMA’s Editorial Guidelines and Principles for Reporting on Children in the Media.[2] MMA believes positive stories with children’s voices have the power to inspire other children to be active citizens with agency.
We applaud Saturday Star for such an inspiring story in which a child is celebrated, portrayed positively and accessed. We look forward to reading more of such articles in future.
By Jacques Ndong
[1] A GLAD is awarded when journalists report positively on a child and respect the rights of that child
[2] http://54.217.43.239/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/mma_editorial_guideline.pdf