AIDS at 25: The Media Coverage

By Keith Boykin, in sexuality
Tuesday, June 6 2006, 3:00PM

One of the messages that doesn't get communicated often enough is that AIDS has increasingly become a disease of people of color. More specifically, it's become a disease of black people. Unfortunately, as the disease has gotten blacker and browner, serious national media attention has all but disappeared. It's been replaced by episodic coverage of key events but not by sustained attention to the problem.

As expected, there were quite a few stories published yesterday and today about the 25th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic. As one who participated in an AIDS press conference yesterday, I was pleased to see the media showed up to cover that specific event. On the other hand, I have to say I am still disappointed by the overall lack of AIDS media coverage, especially as it relates to black communities. It's all too easy to cover the sensationalistic issues like the down low and AIDS conspiracy theories, but it's much more important to report the real stories of real people who are dealing with the epidemic.

As I said, there was a fair amount of AIDS coverage in the past few days. But the real question is what kind of stories will we see in the days and months ahead when there isn't an anniversary to discuss. The people at GLAAD track news coverage on some AIDS-related issues and put together a sampler (provided below) of the coverage for the past few days.

Coverage of the 25th Anniversary of the AIDS Epidemic


Comments (3) reveal

Comments conceal

Kenneth Winfrey[TypeKey Profile Page]
June 7 2006, 11:17AM

As with all the issues, the media have given way to sound bites, sensationalism, and even censorship. It is described as the media "industry" because it seeks profit from activity just like any other "industry." As with any hope for for a vaccine, the only real progress will have to come through the use of new models that can operate outside the "box" beyond mere analysts' projections and hype.

porn oral
February 1 2007, 12:17PM

Since one of the ideas is to split strings not into words, but hopefully into phrases more semantically informative than the words they are made of, doing that better should mean better suggestions, and avoiding what essentially are word n-tuples should make for smaller data and slightly faster querying.

ma611zda
December 10 2007, 6:53PM

c928t


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