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| Photo by Jon Hiskes |
| Associate professor Jim Kelly (seated) showed South Asian journalists around the grad lounge during their first day at Ernie Pyle Hall. |
“There is a disconnect between the community as a whole and those who are living with HIV,” said Bhattacharjee, who lives in the northeastern state of Assam.
School of Journalism associate professor Jim Kelly and one of his former colleagues at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale found the same problems during their teaching in India. They see better journalism as part of the solution, and through a State Department grant, they arranged for Bhattacharjee and five other South Asian journalists and educators to travel to the United States for a program on reporting HIV/AIDS.
The six began their work at IU on Monday, meeting with journalism faculty and students and attending faculty-led workshops. After two weeks in Bloomington, they will complete weeklong job-shadowing internships related to their fields before returning home.
The trip is part of a three-year program Kelly and Southern Illinois associate professor Jyotika Ramaprasad are leading to encourage South Asian journalists and non-governmental organizations to work together more effectively on addressing HIV/AIDS. The two received a $275,000 grant from the State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs to pursue the program, which culminates in a conference in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 2010.
“The (South Asian) media has been slow to react to HIV because it also labors under some of the common myths out there, just as the American media was slow to react and affected by the myths in the 1980s,” Kelly said in explaining the project’s focus.
Through the grant, he hopes to encourage Indian, Sri Lankan and Pakistani journalists to improve their sourcing by learning from NGOs working on the front lines of the struggle with HIV/AIDS. Currently, news organizations might produce a story when an NGO wins a significant grant or when it holds a meeting, but the reporting too often stops there, Kelly said.
“What they don’t do enough of is using these NGOs as sources of information,” he said. “Those are people who go into villages to test for HIV and AIDS…and through the course of that they collect all kinds of detailed information about these problems.
“So if a reporter is doing a report on, say, the impact of HIV on the economy, the government has some information, but the government is usually limited to aggregate information. The NGO has local information. They actually know people who are living with HIV. They know how they are surviving, or failing to survive.”
One of the six participants, Manisha Shelat, has tried to teach her students the importance of in-depth reporting on this issue as a journalism professor at the University of Baroda in Gujarat.
“Explaining, analyzing, guiding people—those kinds of stories are missing,” she said of Indian HIV/AIDS coverage.
She will complete her weeklong “internship” at the School of Journalism, working with faculty to learn ways to use hands-on learning and to support student media.
Another participant, Surya Kanta Gosh, works at a Kolkata (Calcutta) NGO that provides HIV prevention, care and advocacy. Its staff, some of whom have HIV and some of whom do not, works to dispel myths about how the virus spreads simply by sharing things such as drinking glasses, he said.
During his time here, Gosh hopes to find ways to persuade Indian journalists to cover the widespread discrimination of individuals with HIV.
“There’s still a social taboo,” he said. “People are not willing to talk about HIV/AIDS.”
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| Photo by Jon Hiskes |
| Associate professor Jim Kelly and faculty, staff and grad students welcomed the South Asian journalists at a casual lunch in the grad lounge. The six will visit the U.S. to refine their skills covering social issues. |
Kelly said some of the journalistic shortfalls he’s seen in South Asia, such as relying too heavily on press releases and treating uneventful meetings as “news,” are common everywhere.
“It’s not because they’re not doing a good job — they are,” he said. “Journalism in South Asia is very robust.”
In fact, newspaper circulation numbers there are growing at about the same rates they are shrinking in the U.S., he said. But the area provides few mid-career education opportunities for journalists, which prompted Kelly and Ramaprasad to propose the grant.
It’s the fourth journalism faculty exchange in which Kelly has participated. He’s led a program focused on NGO/journalist partnership before, but this is the first to focus on addressing HIV/AIDS, he said.
“Without proper education, awareness and simple recognition that HIV is a problem, the incident rate can explode and just overwhelm a society,” he said. “…Journalists can help with that education. They can dispel myths.”
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