SA media in HIV/AIDS denial
A recently released content survey of media news items in eleven southern African countries has added some statistical weight to what we already know: HIV/AIDS issues are shockingly under-reported in South Africa.
The HIV and AIDS and Gender Baseline study, released by Gender Links and the Media Monitoring Project on Wednesday, found that only two percent of news items in South Africa mention the word “HIV”. This compared to 4% in Namibia, 5% in Mozambique, 7% in Botswana, 10% in Swaziland and 19% in Lesotho.
Only one country fared worse than South Africa: the tiny island nation of Mauritius, with one percent of news items. But its HIV prevalence rate is about 0.1%, or 700 people out of its over 1-million population, according to this 2005 Kaiser Family Foundation report. Not exactly headline news for that country.
So it’s not really fair to compare countries with differing HIV prevalence rates. Naturally, a country with more HIV-positive adults would have a media more attuned to the pandemic, wouldn’t it?
If we compare media coverage with adult HIV prevalence in the eleven countries, South Africa fares the worst. Its media coverage of the epidemic is twice as poor as Botswana’s and Namibia’s, even when taking respective HIV/AIDS prevalence rates into account.
|
|
News items that |
2003 Adult HIV |
INDEX |
|
Mauritius |
1.00% |
0.10% |
0.10 |
|
Lesotho |
19.00% |
28.90% |
1.52 |
|
Mozambique |
5.00% |
12.20% |
2.44 |
|
Malawi |
5.00% |
14.20% |
2.84 |
|
Zambia |
5.00% |
16.50% |
3.30 |
|
Swaziland |
10.00% |
38.80% |
3.88 |
|
Tanzania |
2.00% |
8.80% |
4.40 |
|
Namibia |
4.00% |
21.30% |
5.33 |
|
Botswana |
7.00% |
37.30% |
5.33 |
|
Zimbabwe |
3.00% |
24.60% |
8.20 |
|
South Africa |
2.00% |
21.50% |
10.75 |
|
1. HIV and AIDS and Gender Baseline study, 2006 |
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Paradoxically, the country with the largest population of HIV-infected people is receiving the least amount of information on the subject through the media.
Why the South African media is not accessing this massive constituency of people – about 5.3-million media viewers, listeners, readers and users – on an issue that has changed or fundamentally will change their lives is a matter for debate and further research. (“AIDS denialism” rather than “AIDS fatigue” comes to mind.) But it’s clear we’re out of kilter with the rest of southern Africa.
A possible answer is that the market has determined that HIV/AIDS news is not very commercially viable. But the media also has a social responsibility to the public. How about some good old media agenda setting on the issue? A hypodermic needle full of incisive HIV/AIDS journalism could be the cure. – Richard Frank