Annan asks media's help in AIDS education
UNITED NATIONS -- With the AIDS crisis spreading unabated, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called on the international news and entertainment media yesterday to help combat ignorance about the pandemic.
"You can designate the fight against HIV/ AIDS as a corporate priority," Annan said at the UN during a conference of media executives, including Viacom president Mel Karmazin, MTV president Bill Roedy, and Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America. "This would mean a commitment at the highest level, which would translate into a powerful influence on programming."
Annan told the media executives from five continents that the portrayal of fictional characters with AIDS on popular television shows can be more effective in educating young people about the disease than a repetition of statistics on news broadcasts. Those statistics are grim: 40 million people around the world are living with HIV, 3 million were killed by AIDS last year, and more than 20 million have died from the disease since 1981, according to the UN.
"Experts now agree that HIV/AIDS is the worst epidemic history has ever faced," Annan said. "Yet among the public at large, there is still a profound lack of knowledge and awareness, especially among young people."
More than half of young adults and adolescents recently surveyed in 40 countries still have misconceptions about how the virus is transmitted, he said. In some regions, a large percentage have never heard of the disease, according to the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS.
A study of 21 African countries found that 60 percent of girls had at least one major misconception about the virus or were unaware of its existence. In Bolivia, 74 percent of young women have either never heard of AIDS or were seriously misinformed about it.
"As leaders of the media, you have the power and the reach to disseminate the information people need to protect themselves from HIV/ AIDS," Annan said. "Silence is death. As broadcasters, you can bring the disease out of the shadows and get people talking about it in an open, informed way."
The media executives committed to developing more programming with an AIDS theme and to making it available free to local broadcasters globally. They also pledged to increase news coverage of the crisis and to recruit other media companies in their regions to join what the UN is formally billing as the Global Media AIDS Initiative, jointly run with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
"This is one of the instances where I believe media can save more lives than physicians can," Peter Piot, UNAIDS executive director, said at a news conference.
Alexander Dybal, chief executive of Russia's Gazprom-Media, said his television and radio stations would address AIDS in public service announcements and popular programs and would train its staff to better cover the issue.
Pierre El-Daher, chairman of the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp., said that only privately owned media in the Arab world had dealt with AIDS, and he accused governments that own most Arab media of being afraid to confront the issue. "Slowly, this attitude is changing," he said. "Time will be on our side."
Mark Byford, the BBC's deputy director general, said a new series of programs would be launched on BBC Africa. Robert Johnson, founder and CEO of Black Entertainment Television, said BET is working with African-American entertainers and athletes to produce AIDS programming that would be freely shared with media in sub-Saharan Africa.
Karmazin announced that Viacom would commit $200 million more to the $380 million it has spent on AIDS programming and would air a public service announcement on the subject during the Super Bowl on Feb. 1.
