May we shift wars for a moment on this Saturday — from the war on one A (Afghanistan) to another A: AIDS. It is World Aids Day, an occasion mentioned nowhere on the front page of today’s New York Times. I will be marking it with a screening of my film on Nkosi Johnson, the late lovely and late South African Aids orphan I got to know thanks to my work with the FXB foundaion. (www.orphans.fxb.org for more) NKOSI will be shown at the Screening Room in lower Manhattan at 3PM. The small theater is not far from the World Trade Center rubble. New York readers are welcome at this benefit for Medicine Without Frontiers which insists that fighting AIDS is “imperative, not impossible.”

Media attention is the oxygen that keeps public awareness alive. UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, whose major speech on the issue to the Global Health Council in Washington last spring went uncovered by the Washington Post was finally allowed into that venerable institution as an opinion maker, not a news maker. In an op-ed or Viewpoint piece, he appeals on behalf of an AIDS war which is virtually invisible on TV at least:

KEEPING UP THE MOMENTUM

“Every day more than 8,000 people die of AIDS. Every hour almost 600 people become infected. Every minute a child dies of the virus. Just as life — and death — goes on after Sept. 11, so must we continue our fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Before the terrorist attack two months ago, tremendous momentum had been achieved in that fight. To lose it now would be to compound one tragedy with another.”

In the media world, there has always been a hierarchy of death, a scale on which worthy, usually white and western victims take precedence over their counterparts in the Third World. This is a gap that can pump up a sense of righteousness, even arrogance, on those who make it, because the argument can appear to devalue the deaths of people close by. Writing in the Guardian earlier in the week, Ann Karpf nonetheless raises the question. I excerpt her view because it does offer a challenge to those of us in the media as well.

THE HIERARCHY OF DEATH

“Here’s a consumer’s guide to our hierarchy of death. If you want yours to signify in the media and public debate, and your relatives to be decently compensated, make sure you a) are white, and b) a westerner, c) die quickly, dramatically, and spectacularly (not slowly of a disease of poverty or occupational illness), and that d) your death is witnessed by millions,preferably on television; e) if possible, own a mobile.

“Some say it’s inevitable we don’t mourn each death similarly: people grieveinstinctively for those most like themselves. Our modern currency isempathy, extended most freely to those with whom we can identify. In theWashington Holocaust Memorial museum, visitors are issued with the personalidentity card of someone like themselves in age, profession, and gender,caught up in the Holocaust. It’s as if our capacity for empathy can only bekick-started narcissistically, by turning everyone into versions ofourselves. This is dangerous: those who wear the burka can’t play, veiled asthey are in an empathy-barrier, indelibly marked with otherness.

“The lack of equivalence between northern and southern deaths is most graphicin compensation: $121m has been paid out of the American Red Cross’s LibertyFund so far, averaging a $25,000 payment to 25,000 families of thosebereaved or affected by the WTC attacks.

“Contrast this with the average $1,300 compensation a head for the 14,824Indians killed by toxic gas fumes from the American-owned Union Carbidepesticide plant in Bhopal, the site of the world’s worst industrial disasterin 1984. For several hundred thousand people still disabled and diseased,the average payout has been $580.”

THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA IN THE WAR ON AIDS

As for media coverage, this issue was raised at UN “Town Meeting” yesterday at which the small army of AIDS warriors met to keep up its resolve at a time when the issue gets less visibility as it becomes more deadly. April McClemmy from Globalvision represented us and shared some of her experiences with me in an email I am sure she won’t mind having excerpted here:

“I urged the youth to get involved and spoke about NkosiJohnson as being a hero in the fight against AIDS in Africa and how weneed more children like him to speak out. There was a question put on the floor about the media’s responsibility for informing youthabout AIDS. I made mention that MTV has a great influence over many ofour youth and they along with all media have the responsibility to do asmuch as they can to inform our youth. An MTV representative was thereand spoke of how they are trying to do more in the coming year dealingwith the AIDS issue in dealing with the youth”

AIDS COVERAGE IN SOUTH AFRICA

I am afraid this not an issue we can leave to MTV, even though the channel has at least made consistent effort to focus on the issue, especially after one of the members of its Real World cast contracted the disease and won enthusiastic sympathy from viewers. The rest of the media is not a very good job, according to the findings of MEDIA TENOR which has been monitoring media coverage from its office in South Africa, the epicenter of the AIDS disaster. What they find is that the issue has been politicized with inadequate attention paid to those who suffer most.

“In Media Tenor’s research, opposition parties (128 articles) and researchers (80 articles) used HIV/Aids as a platform to question governmental policies concerning this issue.

“However, social representation (671) still came second to the government (756 articles), and of the first 15 major role-players within the analysis of main protagonists of reports on HIV/Aids, only a disproportionate 4 were relevant to grassroots interests.

“HIV/Aids is very much a social issue that ripples out to matters pertaining to the society in which it is rampant, such as education and labour, but the representation of these groups are conspicuously low on the media’s agenda. Although a recent study has shown that an estimated 16-20% of all teachers are HIV positive, mention of the Minister of Education, surfaced in only 15 articles, and the affected group were voiced in a mere 7 articles. Teacher absenteeism was attributed to their Aids related illnesses ? a labour related issue and yet unions, representative of the majority of the South African workforce, figured in only 15 articles during this period with union representatives quoted in 26.

“However, this was mostly in support of the government’s eventual introduction of generic drugs to hospitals and clinics. In comparison, businesses, representative of a group indirectly affected by the disease e.g. losing profit, received more coverage with 265 articles, while company representatives had the highest frequency of coverage in 310 articles. These figures question the distribution of main protagonists and quoted persons, away from grassroots level ? those directly and those indirectly affected.

“This representation is again reflected in the relatively high amount of white African representation (26,1%) in Aids reports considering that this segment of community is far less affected by the pandemic than the black African group (65,8%) ? where a far higher percentage of representation should be expected. This, almost disproportionate attention, is again illustrated in the proportionately low representation of the group probably the hardest hit with the disease and its results: females with 55,6%, compared to males with 44,4%. At the level of care givers there is no dispute that this group should by implication receive far greater attention in the media, as a result of their higher HIV/Aids infection: the babies born contracting the disease from their mothers, and the so-called aids orphans. Aids orphans were mentioned in only 13 articles during the period researched, that contrasts with the extraordinarily high number of 570 reports on cholera in the first quarter of this year, that serves as an indictment to media priority.

WELCOME TO THE AIDS CHANNEL

Mediachannel partner One World.net is responding to this problem of sporadic coverage by launching a new internet channel, like our own, to focus on it. Here’s the announcement of the channel and how activists are respondng in the UK.

“To coincide with World AIDS Day OneWorld Africa is launchingAIDSchannel.org today in partnership of over 100 leading aidagencies, human rights and campaign groups worldwide. The site aimsto promote understanding, knowledge sharing and action on AIDS asa development, social, economic and human rights issue.http://www.AIDSchannel.org. Also launching The Stop AIDS Campaign. This campaign is about people in the UK uniting to demand action against the global AIDS epidemic. The Campaign was set up by 15 development and HIV/AIDS groups who believe that by working together to demand action from our leaders, we can free the world from HIV/AIDS. Most are OneWorld partners. http://www.stopaidscampaign.org.uk

THE PHARMA FIGHT

One last note on AIDS involves the conflict between the large pharmaceutical companies ?which MSNBC noted are now the most profitable companies in the US and those demanding more access to and lower prices for AIDS. ZNET is offering a commentary by Sean Healy today. (FYI: Commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet and that to learn more folks can consult ZNet at http://www.zmag.org)

“There’s not often something to celebrate on World AIDS Day, December 1, but there might be this year: a small, much fought-over clause in a World Trade Organisation declaration may signify a turning of the tide, at least insofar as poor peoples’ access to needed medicines is concerned.

“The clause is simple enough: it states that the set of WTO rules covering patents on drugs, the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), “can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO Members’ right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all'’.

“But this little paragraph was the site of a long, bitter battle between the United States, acting for the big pharmaceutical companies, and Brazil, India and Africa, acting for the majority of the 36 million people with HIV/AIDS who are too poor to afford expensive, patented anti-HIV medicines?.” Clearly this is a debate that demands more tracking.

COMING TO TAKE YOU AWAY?

In the ?when they came for the Jews. I was not a Jew so I did nothing,” department (the quote is by the German cleric who condemned his country’s complicity with the Nazis) the New York Times reports this morning that Mullah John Aschcoft has hopes of extending the crackdown on terrorists to other Americans:

“Attorney General John Ashcroft is considering a plan torelax restrictions on the F.B.I.’s spying on religious andpolitical organizations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/01/national/01BURE.html?todaysheadlines

“IT CAN HAPPEN HERE!”

Meanwhile, my old friend Anthony Lewis, often a traditional middle of the road liberal on many issues is now gunning for John with a passionate polemic from his pulpit on the Op-Ed Page. Here is a taste:

“It Can Happen Here”

“On the basis of secret evidence, the government accuses a non-citizen of connections to terrorism, and holds him in prison for three years. Then a judge conducts a full trial and rejects the terrorism charges. He releases the prisoner. A year later government agents rearrest the man, hold him in solitary confinement and state as facts the terrorism charges that the judge found untrue.

“Could that happen in America? In John Ashcroft’s America it has happened.

“Mazen Al-Najjar, a Palestinian, came to the United States in 1984 as a graduatestudent and stayed to teach at a university. The Immigration Service moved to deport him for overstaying his visa ? and asked an immigration judge, R. Kevin McHugh, to imprison him. Secret evidence, the government lawyers said, showed that Mr. Al-Najjar had raised funds for a terrorist organization, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In June 1997 Judge McHugh issued the detention order.

“Mr. Al-Najjar’s lawyers went to federal court and challenged the use of secretevidence against him. The court held that he must at least be told enough about the evidence to have a fair chance of responding to it.

“Judge McHugh then reopened the case in his immigration court. In a two-week trial the government’s lead witness, an Immigration agent, admitted that there was no evidence of Mr. Al-Najjar contributing to a terrorist organization or ever advocating terrorism. At the end Judge McHugh found that there were no “bona fide reasons to conclude that [Mr. Al- Najjar] is a threat to national security.”

DON’T LAUGH YET

And now Mr Al-Najjar is being given the old heave-ho.” There is a satire circulating on the internet on all this which is beginning to sound more like prophecy than humor. Check it out:

By Chris Floyd

“Are you a terrorist? If you don’t know, you’d better find out fast. Because Uncle Sam’s made a list and he’s checking it twice — “40 to 50 countries” targeted for possible “U.S. action,” according to America’s securely-located vice president, Dick “Chicken Hawk” Cheney. As the man says, a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

“So here’s a simple test to check your moral worthiness and see if you can escape God’s — sorry, Bush’s — all-devouring wrath. Have you ever gone out for a beer and bought a Stella Artois instead of a Bud? Then you, my friend, have engaged in a conspiracy to cause “adverse effects” to the economy of the United States. And that makes you one of the evildoers?.”

ON THE WAR FRONT

Just a quick reprise of other war news. While anarchy and crime erupts inside Afghanistan, and as the one eyed Mullah puts a $50,000 bounty on the heads of western reporters whose objectivity he questions and whose presence he dislikes, there have been proposals to send in peace keepers. No way, says the USA. They will only get in the way. Not needed. European offers have been rebuffed. This is pissing off Europen leaders who are not so privately chafing over the US governments way of participating in a coalition. Do as we say is the mantra, and leaders in Berlin, Moscow, and Paris are growing unhappy. Many say they will not support an attack on Iraq.

Talks stalled in Bonn as the forever quarreling Afghan factions quarrel, with one Pashtun leader (representing the Majority of the country’s tribal people) walks out. The New York Times summary quotes a line from the late cartoonist Pogo: “We have met the enemy and they are us?The Financial Times offers a detailed look at Al Qaeda’s cell structure and suggests that even if Bin Laden is killed, that movement will move on?.A look at the fanatical Islamic Truth (sic) site shows how they still believe the Taliban will win?.

While CNN’s Christine Amanpour was hosting a report from the War Zone last night including dispatch on the phone with snapshots from Walter Rodgers with the Marines, operating under heavy information restrictions, (The Marines welcome reporters, realizing how good publicity helps them at appropriations time while the other services seem to fear it.)..and trying to get a media wise Abdullah Abdullah, the Northern Alliance/United Front to say something. (Q: How do you know he is dissembling? A: When his lips move.),

While all of this was underway, over at Fox News and MSNBC, they were pumping every chord they could over the passing of George Harrison. Only the death of Beatle can bump bin Laden. George’s guitar may have weeped gently, but the networks were using up every bit of archival footage to weep in their own way in a bid to achieve a splash in ratings.

A COMMENT FROM JAPAN

“Tae Higashino” writes from Japan to say that based on her reading of her country’s press, the tragedy in Afghanistan will continue.” Her English may not be perfect, but you get her point. “In Japanese media,they tell that the Northern Alliance has got sovereignty in Afganistan as if it is the end of terrorism.Quality papers tell us that the people in Afghanistan have been released from depressing miserable and now they are happy.I thought it is not the end of any kind of tragedy..That’s it” Thanks Tae for that. I like the phrase “depressing miserable” very much because that is what I am trying to avoid becoming.

MEDIA APPROVAL UP, SORT OF

Speaking of media, I am sad to report that despite my best efforts, and this daily dissection, the media is enjoying a spike in public approval. Here’s a report from the Milwaukee Sentinel

“Media’s image improves since Sept. 11

“The war on terrorism is giving a boost to the public perception of the media, a new poll published by the Pew Research Center shows.

“”Pew editor Carroll Doherty said these numbers were ‘fairly impressive’ and a ?real rebound’ for the media, which had come under fire in the 1990s by a public that questioned its practices, motives and values,” writes Mike Johnson of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

“”In other polls, journalists’ approval ratings typically are lower than those of nurses, doctors and teachers on honesty and ethics. Only about 20 percent of Americans gave journalists, lawyers and building contractors high marks for honesty and ethics in a Gallup poll last year. By comparison, more than 60 percent gave high marks to nurses, doctors and teachers.”

“A new all-time high of 60 percent was registered of those polled who said the media is protecting democracy, up from 46 percent in September. Those who thought the media usually gets the facts straight rose from 35 percent to 46 percent, the best rating since 1992.

“The poll indicates 45 percent think the media are “usually accurate,” a drop from 57 percent in September. In covering the events of Sept. 11 and the war on terrorism, 77 percent said the media did an excellent or good job, compared to 89 percent in September.

SALUTING CROCKER SNOW

As you mull over these findings which note that over half the people doubt that the media gets the facts straight, may I salute Crocker Snow, the visionary former Boston Globe editor who created and ran the World Paper/World Timesfor two decades, and has now stepped down. He is a mentor of mine and a journalist of distinction.Crocker wrote the preface for the book on the media role in the 2000 Presidential election that I co-edited with Roland Schatz. (www.electronpress.com) The paper will continue under the able direction of Perter Orne. Have a look at www.worldpaper.com

Tomorrow, US readers will be able to hear a snatch of me coming to the defense of British journalists on National Public Radio’s On The Media program at 3PM Eastern time. (The show is also on the web at onthemedia.org or through wnyc.org). That’s all for now,. I now have to turn to the hard task of trying to raise money to keep Mediachannel.org alive. If you find what we do of value, help sustain us with a holiday gift. Write: Dissector@mediachannel.org to comment or contribute.