South Africa's Media Battles to Get AIDS Message Across

South Africa's AIDS crisis is the biggest news to hit the country since apartheid ended in 1994 -- but the nation's media do not always treat it that way. AIDS is rarely the top story. Most newspapers buried coverage of this week's UN AIDS summit on their international news pages. "What I want the media to do is go into a mode where they treat [AIDS] like a war," said Clem Sunter, an official at Anglo American mining and a prominent AIDS researcher.

Gwen Ansell, executive director of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism, said the mainstream broadcast media, which reaches more South Africans than any other medium, still has a long way to go. AIDS remains "a health story, rather than a more general story," she said.

The powerful stigma around AIDS and South Africans' reluctance to discuss it make reporting on the epidemic even harder. Newspapers fear losing readers if their coverage is too negative. Ansell, however, believes they need to rethink their approach. "A lot of the information that could be got across about living with HIV is not necessarily a bad news story," she said. "One gets the same image of the hunched skeleton on the bed over and over again, without people thinking this is a medical condition one can live with."

Still, the magnitude of the world's worst AIDS crisis demands that South Africa's media be more aggressive in educating the public, Sunter said. "More than any other force, it's going to shape our society over the next 20 years. We are getting to the point where you are going to have to go for saturation coverage, whether it sells newspapers or not," he said.

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