Zina Kumok | April 10, 2011
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| Photo by Zina Kumok |
| Doctoral candidate Ammina Kothari explained her research into media and HIV/AIDS coverage in Tanzania at the Wednesday Research Colloquium. |
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At Wednesday’s Research Colloquium, doctoral candidate Ammina Kothari presented “Media and HIV/AIDS Epidemic in Tanzania: An investigation of relations between journalists, sources and content” to explain these hurdles.
Kothari said she chose to study this issue because the non-governmental organizations that try to help people with HIV/AIDS get a lot of funding, some from the United States.
“It’s important to study because there's still a lot of money being put into creating awareness,” Kothari said.
Tanzania has one of the higher rates of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. It is not just an epidemic, she said, “It is a social, economic and government problem.”
Some of the biggest impediments to solving the HIV/AIDS issue are similar to those of other countries: Men with disease spreading it to their partners, women spreading it to children, and sex workers spreading it to men.
“It’s difficult for people to talk about,” Kothari said.
For her research, Kothari wanted to examine the coverage of HIV/AIDS and see if it was event- or issue-oriented, who were the dominant sources, what factors affect journalists and editors during the reporting and news selection processes, and what issues covered in the media are related to HIV/AIDS.
Her sample included articles from December 1, 2008 to May 2010, shortly before her June visit to Tanzania. She analyzed work from two newspapers, the government-owned The Daily News and The Guardian, a privately-owned newspaper. She also interviewed journalists and non-governmental organizations working on HIV/AIDS to find out how they perceive media and to determine their working relationships with media.
Through her research, she found the articles were mostly event-oriented because to the journalists, HIV/AIDS is “old news” and focused on public events rather than actual issues. She said most of the articles were written by men and used male sources, compounding the problem of a lack of coverage on women’s issues within the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
“The gender dimension is still not receiving attention,” Kothari said.
Other issues affecting coverage are economic: Journalists don't have funds to travel to rural areas where the real stories. Another is training. Journalists lack specialized training to be able to report on medical issues related to HIV/AIDS, especially medical advancements and new drugs.
“These are the stories not being written,” Kothari said. "The stories that need to be told are what's happening in rural areas, which have little access to medical treatment, and campaigns to create better awareness."
But she also pointed out that the situation is not totally bleak. For example, the Tanzania Media Women’s Association was started in 1987 by female journalists to present perspectives that were not being covered in the media, and the Association of Journalists Against AIDS in Tanzania, launched in 2003, is training journalists to report more sensitively about the epidemic.
Next in her research, Kothari hopes to talk to news audiences, especially those living with HIV/AIDS who are clients of non-governmental organizations, to understand how they use media to understand the epidemic.
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