The Hindu : New Delhi News : AIDS hogs the limelight

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 08, 2005

New Delhi

New Delhi

AIDS hogs the limelight

Bindu Shajan Perappadan

NEW DELHI: Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) may still have no vaccine or cure in sight but what this dreaded disease does not seem to lack is "news value". Cited as the media story equivalent of "man biting dog" variety of news, AIDS and related stories make up half of the one per cent coverage of all "health news" covered by Indian newspapers and news channels.

Ranked Disease No. 1 by the media in terms of its coverage space, the fact was brought to light with the release of a study undertaken by the Centre for Media Studies (CMS) Media Lab which established that while "health news accounts for only one per cent of total news, AIDS related news accounted for more than half of this". The study also tried to understand priority in terms of the drivers of the news, positioning and the range of news stories in the sense of importance of HIV issues. Surveyed and the complied in four months (Nov. 2004-Feb. 2005), CMS scrutinised 14 English and Hindi dailies and six news channels which carried more than two HIV-related news items a day in those 120 days.

"We accept that this may be because there were some landmark HIV events during this period including World AIDS Day, AIDS media summit in New Delhi and launch of human trials of HIV vaccine in India. At that time there were almost 54 stories and articles around World AIDS Day.

Other major events including human trails of HIV vaccine, increase in intravenous drug injecting (IDU) incidence in Delhi, seminars organised by UN agencies and non-government organisations dominated the HIV news," said the Assistant Director (Communication), CMS, Paramita Dasgupta, who was part of the study.

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