Page 98 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

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someone who has AIDS does put one at risk, but the question is among
what populations does one have a significant risk of meeting someone
who has AIDS. With this in mind, it would seem the choice of Jane
Curtin and the atmosphere of the safe suburban school is aiming at the
wrong target.
Furthermore, if the threat were as serious as one is led by innuendo to
believe, the facile and fleeting encounters in kitchen, car and living-
room that are shown as models would hardly suffice, nor would a string
of such superficial verbal joustings between embarrassed teenagers and
unconfident, unknowledgeable and tentative parents. Given the real
statistics, parents should want to know if their children are homosexual
and/or intravenous drug users, which would put them at serious risk. Yet
these questions are not addressed at all.
This video does not reach those at risk but does reach those who can
misread the message as not for them (about AIDS) so they can ignore
the rest (about parent-child communication and sexual responsibility in
general).
Like any aid to family communication and any video that deals
frankly with sex, especially in a general population scared out of its wits
by stories about AIDS, Talking with Teens was enormously popular.
Metropolitan Life has underwritten ‘AIDS Lifeline’ for Group W to
the tune of one million dollars. As a result, Mr John Creedon, the CEO
of Metropolitan Life, presents the Group specials through a brief tape
made in his office, in which he declares how important Met Life feels
proper information and public education about AIDS is. In this context
he then states: ‘We believe the AIDS epidemic may be the most serious
health issue facing our nation and the world in this century.’ Not
malnutrition, not toxic and radioactive pollution, not even smoking and
alcoholism, all of which either actually do, or seriously threaten to, kill
far more humans? No one can make light of the seriousness of a fatal
and loathsome disease for those who have it and those likely to get it. A
large variety of cancers are such diseases. But hyperbole and fear are not
helpful. To paraphrase Jane Curtin, accurate information is the best
defense.
AIDS is a complex disease involved with all the psychological twists
and turns we associate with sex and with sexual deviance. Its major
victims are a controversial group who have a huge political stake in
distancing themselves from a disease which might be labeled ‘the gay
disease’, and thus add to the motives for discrimination they already
suffer. The heart-breaking slow course of the disease and its pandora
box of secondary infections and other diseases makes AIDS a treatment