“There are multiple reasons why the media has dropped the ball,” said Richards,associate dean in School of Journalism and Mass Communication, who has studied the HIV epidemic for the last 20 years. “The struggle for media was trying to find a new angle and a new way to cover it.”
Press coverage of HIV/AIDS has been on a steady decline since the 1990s, even as the rates of HIV infected individuals continue to increase in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward counties between Latino and African-Americans, according to Richards.
“It was not something that people wanted to hear about or talk about because it does not help a high tourist area to know that AIDS is rampant,” Richards said. “It was hitting the minorities, African-Americans and Hispanic communities that were not well represented [in the media].”
Nearly 40,000 articles had been written nationally about the HIV/AIDS during the first two decades after the discovery of the disease, according to data provided by Princeton Survey Report Associates.
The abundance of media attention was reflected in the prolific amount of news stories on key events that captured the country’s attention during that time. This included the initial reports by the Center for Disease Control on the “Gay Pneumonia” to basketball superstar Earvin “Magic” Johnson announcing that he was HIV positive–a news conference that was seen by tens of millions of television viewers.
“When the anti-retroviral medicines came in the ‘96 and the disease became managed if not cured, it was no longer a death sentence for people,” Richards said.
As the nature of the HIV/AIDS epidemic changed into a chronic disease that more people live with, and manage day to day, the percentage of stories in national coverage declined, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation National Survey of Americans on HIV/AIDS.
The medical advances in combating the diseases set a pattern of new media stories that stressed the overall developments but decreased the attention to those still suffering from the illness especially.
“There has been a major transformation in HIV/AIDS and HIV infected individuals and what we can do for them,” said Anthony Fauci, an immunologist who has made substantial contributions to research to HIV/AIDS. “We still have an unacceptably high rate of infection throughout the world and the United States with 2.7 million new infections worldwide.”
Experts, like those at the International Conference on AIDS, have labeled this drop of press coverage the “AIDS fatigue”— the phenomenon where individuals previously concerned about the impact of HIV/AIDS have become seemingly desensitized because of the overload of information on the topic.
Statistics released last year by the CDC show that Miami has the highest incidences of AIDS in the country and yet within the last few years, news outlets have remained relatively silent about the wide-spread issue, according to statistics provided by the Kaiser Family Foundation National Survey of Americans on HIV/AIDS.
Ultimately, coverage of the HIV/AIDS issue by mainstream media serves as an important gauge of how prominent the issue is on the national agenda.
“I see improvements on the way public health is trying to publicize it, but there can be a stronger campaign,” Richards said. “Considering the high rate of disease here, it’s terrible.”
Semester after semester, he continues to find that media coverage has steadily remained quiet and most of his students are still not aware of how significant the epidemic remains in the region.
“It is the same response that I got in 2008,” he said, ”only five years later.”
