Page 95 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

84 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

AIDS. We cut to a matronly Hispanic school counselor who
sympathizes with Curtin about the difficulty parents have accepting that
their child is a sexual being, who may well be in the intimate hands of
some stranger (to the parents).
Curtin then voices over a series of billboarded simple statistics: that
seven girls and eight boys of every ten are sexually active as teens, that
one in ten teenage girls becomes pregnant and that one out of seven of
either sex get some sexually transmitted disease. There is also the figure
of 200,000 intravenous drug users among all American teenagers, cited
as a low estimate. No AIDS statistics are introduced at all. But after
these general statistics there is a cut to Dr Robert Scott, a black internist
who practices internal medicine in Oakland and specializes in AIDS
cases. He states flatly, on the heels of these statistics, that ‘The potential
for getting the disease [AIDS] in that population is going to be
explosive.’
We then cut to a group of teenagers having a discussion in school
about sexual activity in general with random references to AIDS. The
discussion leader, Ms Kim Cox, ‘health educator’, then says to Curtin
and us, ‘Sex is a natural way of living. Unfortunately, it is becoming a
common way of dying.’
After this mélange of statistics and random comments, about teen sex
in general and pointed dire predictions and statements from authority
figures about AIDS, Curtin states: ‘Accurate information is the best
defense.’ There follows a short graphic depiction of virus invasion of
the body’s immune system cells with a voice-over stating that the AIDS
virus is ‘very hard to catch. It is a fragile’—and here the face behind the
voice, that of Dr Mervyn Silverman, Director of the American
Foundation for AIDS Research, fills the screen— ‘virus; it can be
destroyed by soap and water…. Study after study shows that you don’t
easily get AIDS.’
The good doctor is interrupted so that Curtin can voice-over large
billboard statements to the effect that AIDS cannot be contracted from
casual contact, which is defined as sharing a glass of water, hugging,
handshakes, even kissing, if it is not deep open mouth kissing. Dr Scott
reappears to indicate that one can care for a person with AIDS and even
have skin contact with urine, feces and vomit without being in danger,
provided one is careful.
Curtin then asks the rhetorical question, how do you get it? Graphics
return in the shape of male and female having genital-to-genital
heterosexual intercourse while Curtin intones ‘Any unprotected sexual
contact, sharing of semen and vaginal fluids with someone who has