The media coverage on HIV/AIDS within the Pittsburgh area has been less than enthusiastic. While our two newspapers - the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review - do occasionally write articles about HIV/AIDS, they fail to recognize AIDS as an epidemic in our community and society. Instead, they prefer to take the “over there” approach to this harmful disease. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, being the more liberal of the two papers, does tend to write more articles on HIV/AIDS than the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, yet the Gazette still seems to push the topic of HIV/AIDS in Allegheny County to the side.

Pittsburgh, being the medical research city that it is, tends to have many reports on drug therapies and new research institutions being built in order to study the topic of AIDS. For example, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review the University of Pittsburgh is said to receive $16 million in research funds over a time period of 5 years in order to launch the Pittsburgh Center for HIV Protein Interactions at U Pitt’s new biomedical science tower in Oakland (Heinrichs, 1). While this new center definitely pushes the AIDS epidemic to the forefront of Pittsburgh medical research, the media consistently fails to say anything about AIDS hitting home, to the Pittsburgh community itself.

Very few articles even concerning AIDS are placed within the conservative paper of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Furthermore, all articles even including the topic of AIDS within the Tribune-Review are put out on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, unless they involve the Bush administration’s policy making on AIDS towards other countries, in which case, they make front page of the World section in the Sunday paper. The placement of policy articles in the Sunday paper tends to correlate with the Tribune-Review’s own conservative/republican agenda, and much less with the AIDS epidemic.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette isn’t much better. Most HIV/AIDS articles that end up in this newspaper tend to hit on Mondays or Fridays and again, are only in the Sunday news if the article has something to do with policy making. Also, almost all articles on AIDS are in the health or science, medicine, and technology sections. While some end up in the national and world news, they are typically only in reference to policy making towards AIDS in other countries. On the plus side, most HIV/ADIS articles do tend to make the front page of their said sections in the Post-Gazette, as long as they don’t concern AIDS in Pittsburgh as an actual problem. If so, then they are unfortunately placed on the inside of the paper, in the middle, where people are less likely to read them.

One article that I did find rather informative was in regards to an AIDS week taking place within the Pittsburgh community. This rather brief article, titled “WEEK TO STRESS AIDS AWARENESS AND EDUCATION,” was in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in March of 2006, on the inside of the health section. Schedules and information on how to participate and what numbers to call are located within the news-piece, as well as informative data like “in Allegheny county, blacks are 12 percent of the population, but in 2002 represented 55 percent of the county’s reported AIDS cases” (Dyer, 1). Data like this is a great addition the article because it allows people to realize that AIDS is indeed a problem in Pittsburgh, and that there are places to go in order to assist in AIDS awareness. While there are still no real HIV/AIDS walks or rallies like those in other cities, this article was a great start for informing people about the AIDS epidemic in Pittsburgh.