Death by Tabloid

From The Atlantic Monthly-

IT’S MID-AFTERNOON when Giles Muhame, 23, finally arrives at the canteen of Kampala’s Makerere University. He first blames the traffic, and then suggests that he was observing me from a distance for some time. Making sure I was not working for them. “These homosexuals are very dangerous, by the way,” he says.

Muhame knows this is true, he tells me, because he investigated homosexuality last year, while he was still a journalism student. After interviewing 20 “ex-homosexuals,” he revealed his findings in Rolling Stone, a sporadically published tabloid newspaper that he and two classmates launched last August. “We Shall Recruit 1,000,000 Innocent Kids by 2012—Homos,” roared the front page of Rolling Stone’s fifth issue, which included a promise to publish 100 pictures of the country’s “top homos.” Two of them, including a gay activist named David Kato, were pictured on the front page, under the words “Hang Them.” Kato, who the paper said “spots [sic] a clean shaven moustache,” took Muhame and Rolling Stone to court, winning an injunction preventing Muhame and the paper from publishing any more pictures or information identifying gays. Three weeks later, shortly before I met Muhame, Kato was bludgeoned to death with a hammer.

After running the story identifying Kato, Rolling Stone published a piece headlined “Homo Generals Plotted Kampala Terror Attacks.” The “intelligence exclusive” alleged that a gay lobby conspired with al-Shabaab, a Somali Islamist group, to plot the July 2010 suicide bombings in Kampala that killed 76 people. Showing me the story, Muhame leans forward and softly says, “See, there’s a link between homosexuals and terror.”

More here-

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/06/death-by-tabloid/8491/