HIV on TV: Popular Culture's Epidemic Book Review

2005

250 hiv/aids, soap operas and young viewers: exploring the intersection of media effects and reception analysis and its implications for health communication* Rafael Obregón rafael obregón associate professor, school of telecommunications director, m.a., communication for development studies, ohio university athens. associate professor, social communications program universidad del norte, barranquilla (colombia). ph.d., interdisciplinary program in mass communications, college of communications, the pennsylvania state university. m.a., communications and social development, ohio university. [email protected] Dirección: M.A., Communication for Development Studies Ohio University Athens, OH 45701, U.S.A. investigación y desarrollo vol. 13, n° 2 (2005) -issn 0121-3261

Journal of Health Communication, 2005

This project was supported in part by an appointment to the Research Participation Program for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an agreement between the Department of Energy and CDC. We thank the study participants for their involvement. We also thank the community-based organization volunteers who helped with the data collection.

Broadcasting the Pandemic is a monograph published by HSRC Press in 2014. It tells the story of a South African television show, 'Siyayinqoba/Beat It!'. Created during the aspirational years of the political transition in which the broadcast media were poised to democratize the airwaves, 'Beat It!' was first screened on public television in 1999 and developed into one of the most powerful health education initiatives in contemporary history. Broadcasting the Pandemic traces the show’s evolution, exploring how 'Beat It!' used the medium of television to inform its viewers about HIV at a time of increasingly rapid infection rates, but in which government education and treatment campaigns were largely absent. 'Broadcasting the Pandemic' pioneers a new methodology in scholarship about South Africa – using a television programme to explore the history of AIDS activism and policy. It provides a contemporary history of television in South Africa, and of its role in the most influential social movement to have emerged from the democratic transition: the HIV activist movement. Its content will interest readers from a wide array of disciplines, including African Studies, journalism, public health, sociology, cultural studies and the history of medicine. Contents: Introduction Chapter 1: HIV in South Africa: A brief history Chapter 2: Politics and pandemic on South African television Chapter 3: Stigma, disclosure and 'positive living' on Beat It! Chapter 4: The revolution will be televised: HIV and the 'new struggle' on Beat It! Chapter 5: Antiretrovirals on the airwaves: Using television to promote access to HIV treatment Chapter 6: Confronting myths: Beat It!, biomedicine and traditional healing Chapter 7: AIDS denialism, unregulated experiments and curative claims Chapter 8: Broadcasting dissent: Beat It!'s programming on the SABC Chapter 9: 'Beat It! has become my life partner': Participatory programming and HIV-positive patriotism Appendices Glossary References Index

2018

Media plays an important role in the social landscape that helps to shape audience perceptions and it also facilitates public discourse and debate by defining acceptable parameters for discussion. According to Collins (2004), media serves as sense-makers to world and become the primary presenters of ideology for the large audience consumption, integrating the fact that media is vital as most commonly shared source of information. Controversial social issues and concerns become the common strengths for the conventional and mainstream media practices and it is represented in various media context (Hart, 1999). Based on Hart’s view, Piontek (1992) also claimed the issues on sexuality especially on homosexuality is dominantly geared by the media representation. He added these representations are fundamentally equipped with the intention to strengthen the society’s knowledge and perception towards their understanding on epidemic diseases such as the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (A...

2019

We test the effectiveness of an entertainment education TV series, MTV Shuga, aimed at providing information and changing attitudes and behaviors related to HIV/AIDS. Using a simple model we show that "edutainment" can work through an individual or a social channel. We conducted a randomized controlled trial in urban Nigeria where young viewers were exposed to MTV Shuga or to a placebo TV series. Among those exposed to MTV Shuga, we created additional variation in the social messages they received and in the people with whom they watched the show. We find significant improvements in knowledge and attitudes towards HIV and risky sexual behavior. Treated subjects are twice as likely to get tested for HIV eight months after the intervention. We also find reductions in STDs among women. These effects are stronger for viewers who report being more involved with the narrative, consistent with the psychological underpinnings of edutainment. Our experimental manipulations of the social norm component did not produce significantly different results from the main treatment. The individual effect of edutainment thus seems to have prevailed in the context of our study.

Journal of Communication, 2004

On both days, the number of attempted calls to the Hotline in the 1-hour time slots during and just after the 30-minute broadcasts rose dramatically. These increases in information-seeking behavior are consistent with predictions based on social cognitive theory, the health belief model, and various models of information processing. The increases also provide support for the Education-Entertainment approach and underscore the importance of a productive partnership between public health and the entertainment industry.

Qualitative Health Research, 2014

We qualitatively examined gay men's reactions to the national "Drama Downunder" (DDU) HIV/STI social marketing campaign targeting gay men in Australia to identify key campaign elements that underpinned the demonstrated effectiveness of the campaign. We present findings from six focus groups held with 49 participants as part of the evaluation of the DDU campaign over 2008-2009. Participants identified attention-grabbing images, a humorous approach, positive and simple messaging and the use of mainstream media as campaign features crucial in helping normalise sexual health testing, drive campaign engagement and ensure high message exposure. Balancing positive and negative campaign images and finding new ways to engage men with sexual health topics, particularly younger gay men, should be considered. We discuss the implications of these qualitative findings on campaign effectiveness for future campaign and message design.

Survival, 2016

Recent popular films have reconstructed the history of AIDS activism to suggest that the global AIDS crisis was fought against and won by white men in the United States seeking biomedical interventions. This massive misconstrual dismisses the momentous and ongoing contributions of women and queer of color AIDS activists. It severely misrepresents the politics of many of the white men involved. Furthermore, it obscures the ongoing pandemic as it continues to disproportionately affect women and people of color and those living in the global south. This article explores the alternative creative and political strategies for survival employed by feminist and queer of color video collectives during the emergence of the U.S. AIDS crisis (1980s and early-1990s). It demonstrates how the footage generated by these artist-activists invented new political imaginations and representations of life that anticipate and challenge the mainstreaming and commercialization of AIDS representations in today’s popular films like How to Survive a Plague (2012) and Dallas Buyers Club (2013). By tracing the images of women and queers of color that appear momentarily in the feature-length documentary film, How to Survive a Plague, this article theorizes how queer of color AIDS images attain “afterlives” through their adaptation and circulation in contemporary popular media. Faced with the massive loss of people, especially women and people of color, feminist and queer of color video activist collectives innovated upon the tactics for representing AIDS to confront the regimes of neoliberalism and securitization that forged their precarious conditions. Feminist and queer of color AIDS video artist-activists cared for the bodies and the images of those who were most vulnerable to the crisis not simply to prolong life—they anticipated that these videos and images would return as the afterlives of those who might come to pass.

2015

/ This article explores the meanings given by Indian viewers to a series of health-related episodes dealing with ‘Tony’s HIV ’ in the Hollywood television soap opera, The Bold and the Beautiful. Forty-two respondents in six focus group interviews and in 17 in-depth personal inter-views were asked for their interpretations of this television health content. Indian respondents inter-preted the sexual explicitness and the assertiveness of female characters as characteristic of the US, but not as a part of Indian reality. The sexual openness in The Bold and the Beautiful ‘shocked’ Indian viewers, and led some to watch the episodes only in private. Indian respondents generally had positive reactions to the ‘Tony’s HIV ’ episodes, although they felt that self-disclosure of HIV/AIDS status could not happen in India, where HIV/AIDS is highly stigmatized. In general, Indian respondents felt that ‘Tony’s HIV ’ showed an ideal situation regarding HIV/AIDS, but one that was far removed from Ind...

AIDS: Rights, Risk and Reason, 1992

If we relinquish the compulsion to separate true representations of AIDS from false ones and concentrate instead on the process and consequences of representation and discursive production, we can begin to sort out how particular versions of truth are produced and sustained; and what cultural work they do in given-contexts. Such an approach ... raises questions not so much about truth as about power and representation. (Treichler, 1989, p. 48) The prevalence of HIV infection in Africa and the question of the origins of HIV are contentious and much debated topics. The scientifIc validity of the African origin theory has been called into question, and the 'Green Monkey Theory' (the idea that HIV originated among African monkeys and then spread to human beings) has now been rejected by some of the scientists who fmt propounded it (Chirimuuta and Chirimuuta, 1989). The prevalence of infection in different African countries is also not a straightforward matter. For example, the early HIV "antibody test cross-reacted with the antibodies to malarial plasmodium, 'resulting in a huge number of false positive results' (Patton, 1990, p. 26). I?lack scientists, activists, grassroots workers and researchers have challenged the assumptions of much Western scientifIc theorizing about the origins of HIV, and analysts of the media have highlighted racist subtexts in reporting about AIDS and Africa (see However, there is little empirical research exploring how media reporting might actually relate to audience understandings. This chapter focuses On audiences and the role of the media in changing, reinforcing or contributing to Ideas about AIDS, Africa and race. It does not argue that HIV either does, or does not, originate in Africa, nor does it seek to deny the terrible suffering caused by HIV in certain parts of Africa. Here weare not directly addressing questions about where the virus 'really' came from or the actu'aI distribution of infection. Instead we are focusing on how different answers to these questions are produced, framed and sustained, what these tell us about the construction of, AIDS' and 'Africa', 'and what socio-political consequences they carry with them. This chapter addresses 'questions such as: 28 ..