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Television |
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At the start of my research, I believed my limited knowledge regarding AIDS was my own fault. As a young teenage girl, I admit I preferred to spend my limited free time finding out who called who a “Bitch” on MTV’s “The Real World” rather than watching the evening news. Once I was presented with the AIDS statistics for my home town, I immediately blamed my lack of AIDS knowledge on my poor taste in television shows. Looking back, however, watching MTV every afternoon taught me a more important lesson about AIDS than any story reported on a nightly news-station.
Picture taken from (www.thinkhiv.org/ After returning home from a long day of school, I would find great pleasure in lying on my black, leather living-room sofa. With a remote control in one hand and popcorn in the other, I watched MTV’s Total Request Live for an hour to relax, each day, before starting hours of homework. I began to notice that the show was broken up by about five commercial breaks, and right before TRL would return, MTV always included a little commercial of its own. MTV understands that teenagers make up its audience, and therefore creates commercials that promote safe sex. Not every MTV commercial is about safe sex; however, what is important is that there are commercials that encourage its viewers to get tested for HIV. The mere fact that commercials exist strongly promoting the testing of HIV led me to believe there are people who are infected with HIV, are unaware, and are spreading it to their sexual partners. Frightened by this realization, I continued my research and discovered that in 2005, 65% of the women who contracted HIV/AIDS through heterosexual contact had sexual intercourse with partners that were unaware of their HIV risk (Source 4). It then became apparent to me that the crux of the problem lies in the lack of coverage, exposure and ultimately knowledge, of AIDS. |
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A Definition The Facts Newspaper Television A Final Word
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