Page 97 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

86 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

graphics, authority figures and the settings for parent-teenager
interchange, are misleading.
Is the subject AIDS and how to guard against it or how to deal with
your child’s first steps into sexuality? The video never made up its
mind.
Furthermore, two juxtapositions seem to be deliberately misleading.
After giving prominence to the statistic that one in seven sexually active
teenagers will contract a sexually transmitted disease, there is a cut to a
doctor who claims (we do not know the context of the interview from
which this snippet was taken) that there is a potential for an ‘explosion’
of AIDS in that population. When another authority figure is pointing
out how difficult it is to get AIDS, the sound is fighting graphics of the
AIDS virus vividly succeeding in infecting an immune system.
Immediately after the correct information of how weak the virus is, the
script jumps to the conclusion that it is casual contact (not the virus)
that is ‘weak’, that is, hardly likely to spread the disease. This distortion
is followed by a description of how one does get the disease, with graphics
displaying normal heterosexual intercourse. The true parts add up to the
false, and seriously false, impression that there is a serious risk of
contracting AIDS from normal heterosexual intercourse.
As for the tone of the parent-teenager interchanges and the sad story
of Michael Stone, the clear implication is that middle-class heterosexual
non-drug users with caring affluent parents are at serious risk of AIDS.
Although we can all use sex education and although drug abuse in the
non-intravenous forms of crack, speed and marijuana, unwanted teen
pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases like herpes and clamydia
(which are not laughing matters) are certainly not unknown among the
affluent, mostly white middle classes, AIDS is rare in this group. It was
rare two years ago, when the film was shown, and it remains rare today,
two years into the epidemic ‘explosion’. AIDS is on a rampage, however,
among those who practice the risky behavior of anal and oral sex
promiscuously and among intravenous drug abusers who share needles.
This risky behavior is particularly prevalent among the risk groups of
homosexuals, who are the overwhelming majority of victims of the
disease, and drug abusers, who are beginning to catch up with the
homosexuals (as are the children of women, mostly drug abusers, with
AIDS). Although both groups can come from all walks of life,
intravenous drug abuse accompanied by sharing of needles is
overwhelmingly a practice in racial and economic ghettoes; put another
way, such self-destructive behavior is most often the consequence of
poverty and racial discrimination. Any kind of unprotected sex with