Sex, Aids, Press

By: Sharon White
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:25:27
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The journalists frequently use demonising expressions in their articles to make the situations seem a lot worse and the case of aids was of no exclusion. They applied references to acts of God and described Aids as a punishment for a dubious way of life. Although not everyone who contracted Aids were at fault of committing sin.

When a young school girl was diagnosed with the disease one newspaper asked “why should the innocent suffer.” This was the perfect example of the newspapers picking and choosing who too demonise as they knew they could not make the public fear a small school girl. Also mentioned was the fact that the homosexuals were mentioned as “others.” Television used the excuse that they had a duty to protect their viewers and that children could be watching so they didn’t refer to them directly. This is a good example of the media backing up their negative coverage with the “protection” of their viewers rather than just making certain people look bad. This can be compared with the “Mod’s and Rockers” moral panic in the 90’s where the media coverage turned a small incident into a huge story and inflated the situation.

The conservative Government at the time was being led by Margaret Thatcher and was firmly against any kind of coverage of homosexuals or Aids. They even passed a bill saying that local councils or schools couldn’t show any signs that homosexuals were acceptable. They were eventually backed into a corner by the actions of the Americans who started a campaign to educate people on the details of Aids and sexual behaviour. The campaign in Britain wasn’t a huge success but still brought condemnation from the church for promoting condoms and other types of contraception. In recent times several high profile stars have joined the fight against aids and have spoken out about the Churches responsibility to help the fight. Emma Thompson recently said in an interview with the BBC, “it makes me very angry that religious leaders from this faith have tried to respond negatively to sexual education and to the promotion of condom use.”

Where Britain has such a wide range of media outlets lies the reason that it is so easy to promote a moral panic. Unlike America there hasn’t been a strong movement of Gay Rights protestors and therefore only one side of the story has come through. Also the fact that there is such a wide range of newspapers means that the stories tend to burn themselves out quickly. But this doesn’t change the fact that society has a deep running and strong opinion on what is morally right in regard to sexual behaviour.

In a wider context, the fact that Aids has had such negative coverage in the Newspapers means that many people have tended to think that there is nothing to do about it except make sure people don’t spread it. Obviously this is wrong and there are huge campaigns running to help fight the spread of Aids and to eradicate it. The fact that the media have taken such a negative stance though has and will continue to undermine this. This shows the power the media have in delivering a message. It also shows how powerful they could have been had they supported the case to prevent aids rather than just demonise people for it. Also institutions like the Church should use their Media outlet more positively because they often use the media to denounce acts of “deviance” which people then take as fact rather than opinion. A recent example of this is with the book “the Da Vinci Code” which they have constantly attacked, including on the BBC website, even though it is a fiction book, just because some of the content goes against the word of the bible.

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