UGANDAN TABLOID UNDER FIRE

America’s Rolling Stone magazine has demanded that an anti-gay Ugandan tabloid stop using its name while the country’s media watchdog also condemned the newspaper.

As reported by Mambaonline earlier this month, the Ugandan publication, also named Rolling Stone, outed a number of gay and lesbian Ugandans, published their contact details and called for them to be executed by hanging.

The US-based Rolling Stone pop culture magazine slammed the weekly newspaper saying that it had published “one of the most vile and hateful anti-gay screeds we have ever read”.

It added that it was in no way affiliated with the Ugandan publication and “demanded they cease using our name as a title”.

Uganda’s Independent Media Council criticised the newspaper for its lack of journalistic integrity.

“In Uganda, we have a journalism code of ethics, which is very clear,” Haruna Kanaah, the organisation’s executive secretary, told Voice of America.

“The media should be balanced, accurate and fair. Intruding into people’s privacy, that is not journalism. It is witch-hunting,” he said.

The government’s Ugandan Media Council has told the newspaper to cease publishing, not because of its content, but because it is not registered as required by the law.

Should Rolling Stone fulfil the legal administrative requirements it will apparently be allowed to continue to operate.

Managing editor, Giles Muhame, defended his newspaper’s actions: “We felt there was a need for society to know that such characters exist amongst them. Some of them recruit young children into homosexuality, which is bad and needs to be exposed,” he told The Independent.

There have been reports that at least four people have been attacked since their names were published by the newspaper.