Coronavirus media coverage must avoid the mistakes of the Aids pandemic in Africa

As COVID-19 becomes the most intensely covered virus in history, there are important lessons to be drawn from the media’s reporting of another global pandemic: HIV/Aids.

Whose lives the world deems worthy of saving depends, at least partly, on the stories that journalists tell. This was one of the findings ofinto British media coverage of Africa’s Aids pandemic, in which I analysed 1,281 news reports between 1987 and 2008. At the height of that pandemic, journalists helped to expose how intellectual property laws and the business models of big pharmaceutical companies disregarded the health needs of those living in poorer countries. Such reporting played an important role infor the mass roll-out of life-saving treatment across the global south.

But Aids also provides a darker lesson about the capacity of the media to normalise millions of deaths taking place around us.Until the late 1990s, millions of people dying of Aids-related causes across sub-Saharan Africa were a non-issue for the British media, much like the initial wave of coronavirus deaths in China barely registered on the international media radar. My analysis showed that BBC News reported only 14 times about Aids in Africa between 1987 and 1995, mostly in passing.

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