By Danny Schechter

April 27, 2001, South African Freedom Day:  I am thinking of a little boy today, a boy by the name of Nkosi. You may have heard what happened to him earlier in the week. It was on the wires. Some newspapers carried the story. The incident made ABC-TV in the States and was reported worldwide.

Some armed robbers slipped into his Johannesburg home at one o'clock in the morning, pointing a gun at the woman named Grace who was taking care of him. She had been up late watching TV. They took the TV and the VCR and whatever else they could grab. She was traumatized. Nkosi, who cannot speak now, saw what happened and had seizures the next day.

It might have been treated as just another crime in South Africa, not even worthy of mention because of the country's high crime rate, largely a function of 40-plus percent unemployment.

Nkosi

What set this crime apart is that Nkosi is already famous, the AIDS orphan who had became a voice for other children orphaned by AIDS on a continent that may have as many as 40 million such children by the end of the decade. (While there is disagreement over the precise number of orphans, depending on varying definitions, there is no disagreement that the problem and its social/economic impact are vast.) Nkosi lost his parents to AIDS, was infected with AIDS, and AIDS is about to claim his 12-year-old existence. His body has shrunk. He is wasting away. He may be gone by the time you read this.

How shocking that this most positive of openly HIV-positive young people suffered this indignity in his twilight hours. It is almost too much to bear, since Nkosi insisted on being remembered as more than a victim. "I hate having AIDS," he confessed in an electrifying address to the opening ceremonies of the International AIDS Conference in Durban last summer. (I was there and filed this report.) His example offered hope but also brought tears. "We are normal, we are human beings," he asserted with a big smile. "We can walk. We can talk. Just like everyone else. We are all the same."

Nkosi made news then because his eloquent call on the government to give the anti-AIDS drug AZT to pregnant mothers — "mommies," he called them — helped sway official health policy.

I've met Nkosi and I love him, so I can't profess any objectivity here. On the other hand, you probably haven't heard about him or, for that matter, heard much about the larger cause that he embodies and championed. It is not your fault if you don't know about Nkosi or the growing army of other Nkosis in Africa, because no one is telling you about them. Not with any regularity. Not with any context or explanation. Not in a way that will encourage you to care. Alas, when an issue like this is not on TV regularly in the United States, it doesn't exist for millions of us.

I have been working as a media strategist for almost a year with the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Association, an independent philanthropic wing of the FXB Foundation, which has been leading the fight to bring children orphaned by AIDS into the spotlight. It has been a grueling battle because many media outlets turn the other way, as if the AIDS crisis affects people on another planet.

When many media outlets do cover AIDS, they tend to treat it primarily as a disease and medical problem, not a social and economic crisis that ravages millions worldwide. They focus on the debate over drugs and prevention, not the orphans — children who, incidentally, are mostly not infected and who can be rescued, in the sense that outside resources can be directed to support them in the communities in which they live by supporting families who take them in. The plight of these desperately poor children, often living in child-headed households, could mobilize world concern. (When they don't get "tender loving care," they easily end up as glue-sniffing street kids hustling for survival, or child soldiers. These are the kids who end up breaking into people's houses in the dark of night.)

Countess Albina du Boisrouvray, the activist-philanthropist founder of the FXB Foundation, brought Nkosi to the United States almost a year ago to fulfill a wish common to kids his age: a visit to DisneyWorld. We tried then to interest the U.S. press in his life and the larger issues. He was already a hero to some in Africa.

A Cool Idea
I cooked up a cool idea — a children's press conference with Nkosi and New York school kids at the Manhattan School for Children, an event we arranged with Global Kids, a "gang" of youth activists. It took place a year ago — and it was amazing. But despite hundreds of calls and press releases, only one journalist showed up. Daphne Young of National Public Radio-affiliate WBGO won a prize from the National Association of Black Journalists for reporting it. Otherwise, the media in this big media town were a no-show. We snagged only one other interview in America.

For many years, AIDS activists fought to "break the silence" about AIDS. Now the media silence on AIDS has to be broken. This is not to say there's been no coverage. It's just that what there has been is not commensurate with the scale of the problem. As openly gay and HIV-positive South African Judge Edwin Cameron told us: "It almost defies imaginative description. In the whole of North America there are maybe 900,000 people living with HIV/AIDS, in a continent of 350-plus million people. In South Africa alone, a nation of barely 40 million, we have four to five million. In Africa, there are 30 million. It's a problem not just of facts and figures and statistics, because the statistics disengage one's imaginative insights and capacity for action."

That's why media coverage has to put a human face on this problem, and why stories like Nkosi's are so important. We don't need more victims in our coverage. We need to know how people in Africa are fighting back, and about brave kids like Nkosi who are leading them. This means Africa's press, too, which prefers sports and crime reporting to AIDS coverage, as Media Tenor's monitoring confirms. After studying South Africa's media, they reported: "From February to September 2000, the issue of public health (including AIDS) was the tenth most reported issue."

There has to be reframing of the issue to include the way women and children are being exploited. In South Africa alone, 95,000 children under the age of l5 are HIV-positive, and child rape has doubled in the last year. According to Charlene Smith on the GENDER-AIDS list serv: "In Zimbabwe, according to UNICEF, the highest incidence of rape is in girls under the age of four. In Botswana, the incidence of the rape of girls under the age of 12 went up 65 percent in 1998 and 1999 — and here, of course, in all instances, we are only talking of reported rape." At least some of this, Smith explains, is due to the myth that a man can be cleansed of HIV by having sex with a young girl.

We have to inspire people to care. Right now, many don't. Here are a few consequences of media inattention.

Apathy in The U.S.A.
• Survey Reveals U.S. Apathy Toward International AIDS Crisis

Despite widespread awareness of the international AIDS crisis, more than half of Americans are not likely to donate to AIDS education and prevention programs or to assist children orphaned by the pandemic overseas, according to a national survey by Barna Research, a group linked to Christian organizations. Roughly three out of four Americans are aware that many countries have a large population of AIDS victims; nearly a third are very familiar with the AIDS epidemic overseas, the survey found. In addition, 61 percent of Americans are unlikely to help overseas AIDS prevention and education programs, and 54 percent are unlikely to help AIDS orphans.

• Bush budget has no new money for AIDS.

"The Bush administration plans no increase in AIDS funding in the budget it presented to Congress," reported Bob Roehr in the Bay Area Reporter, April 12, 2001.

"It sounds like all of this talk of compassionate conservatism is coming down to compassion for the wealthy with tax cuts" and not for those most in need, said Patricia Dunn, policy director of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association.

The gap between the U.S. response and world need was the focus of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's call for a massive multi-billion dollar fund to fight AIDS at a recent Africa summit. According to the Wall Street Journal, the World Bank "would probably manage the fund, which researchers estimated could require $7 billion to $10 billion more annually than is currently being spent to fight AIDS. Where that money will come from is yet to be determined. Did you see that reported? Have you read many statements by politicians demanding that more money be spent to save lives? World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn has been reduced to begging the United States for more money in Op-Ed articles, such as the one that appeared on April 18 in The Washington Post: "Rich countries must set an example by putting up funds and offering help. ..." But governments in rich countries are unlikely to act appropriately unless and until their own politicians demand it. And politicians respond to public pressure. And the public responds to media coverage. That's the way it works.

Activists are keeping the issue alive and must be credited with what progress is being made. In South Africa pressure forced drug companies to drop a suit against a government insistent on providing cheaper generic drugs. At Yale students protested universities profiting from AIDS research for pharmaceutical companies, reported The Wall Street Journal on April 12. More recently at Harvard, when students staged fasts and vigils for AIDS orphans, most of the press in Boston ignored them, despite our efforts to get coverage. The students also honored FXB and Albina du Boisrouvray for leading the way on promoting the vital connection between health and human rights. This connection is rarely reported, even though many groups have taken up the challenge.

What Can Be Done?
What is being done by the media?

The short answer: not enough. But some efforts are exemplary, particularly a joint effort by 17 public-service broadcasters to commission AIDS films from filmmakers from Southern Africa. This fabulous initiative, "Steps for the Future," is led by Iikka Vehkalahti, executive producer of Finland's YLE-TV. The broadcasters are raising millions to complete this ambitious effort. (If commercial broadcasters won't join them, how about coughing up some dough?)

On the Web there are new initiatives, too. FXB issues a regular "orphan alert" newsletter with the latest news. The organization's Web site also includes a global petition to support children's rights, a link in the health and human-rights chain. OneWorld.net is about to launch a special AIDS portal based in Lusaka, Zambia, which hopefully will devote more coverage to the orphans crisis. (For more, write sundie@oneworld.net.)

These stories are gripping, as are the stories of mothers and other women, who are suffering terribly and leading the anti-AIDS fight. Readers and viewers need to know; those affected by AIDS are urging us to tell. What's stopping us? Are we the blind leading the blind? If your newspaper, radio or TV station can't find adequate space or airtime for AIDS, tell it to Nkosi.

— Danny Schechter, is executive editor of MediaChannel.org and the co-producer (with Carol DeVoe) of a new video about the life and impact of Nkosi Johnson. Copies are available for broadcast and educational use. Write dissector@mediachannel.org for information.

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