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On my seventeenth birthday, at the start of my junior year in high school, I got what every teenager desperately awaits and what his/her parent truly dreads: a driver’s license. With no room in our garage, I had the privilege of parking my purple-tinted 2000 Saturn SI at the bottom of our lengthy driveway. Since my parking spot was so close to our mailbox, it was my job to bring in the mail and daily paper, The Star-Ledger, each morning. During that walk up my driveway, I was always skimming – I skimmed through the mail to see if I had any letters or magazines and I skimmed through the newspaper to see if there was an article worth reading, or perhaps a Dilbert comic. What I did not realize during those morning ‘skim sessions’ was the impact those headlines would have on my impression of AIDS. Over the course of my junior and senior year, only twelve articles were published in The Star-Ledger regarding HIV/AIDS, two of which did not even include HIV or AIDS in the title (Source 6). The lack of articles aided to my limited knowledge regarding the issue of this epidemic. Not only were AIDS articles rare, but most of them were located on the last page of the first section under the title “Around the Globe,” implying AIDS was a problem in other countries, not the United States. What affected me the most, however, were the titles of the most recent AIDS articles; in the last year, six of the eight articles shared the title, “Africa; Daily HIV/AIDS Report” (Source 6). From the title alone, I thought the article only covered the issue of AIDS in Africa; however, within the article there is a report titled, “New Jersey Will not Allocate Money for Newark’s Pilot Needle-Exchange Program, City Health Officials Say.” Although the article does not explain what the need-exchange program is, it reports that the state will not fund the program, revealing that New Jersey is not doing everything in its power to help control and prevent AIDS (Source 7). What I found more interesting than the article itself were the placement and title of the report. The main title read “Africa: Daily HIV/AIDS report” yet the article provided information about AIDS in New Jersey. Since I simply read headlines, I associated Africa with AIDS, and I therefore made the false assumption that my country, my state, my town did not have to worry about AIDS, for I thought it was only a problem in third world countries. Now that I know the statistics and understand the true reality of AIDS in our country, I cannot help but be frustrated and confused as to why the leading newspaper in my state seems to be hiding AIDS articles when there are 48,431 cases in New Jersey alone [Table 1].
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A Definition The Facts Newspaper Television A Final Word
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