HIV/AIDS Media Monitoring Project - Nigeria

The exercise is meant to serve as a baseline to measure success of media intervention efforts, analyse trends of reporting, and identify training needs. Dissemination of findings of the monitoring project will be accomplished through bi-monthly publications to be circulated to media stakeholders. The reports will also be made available on JAAIDS Nigeria site.

HIV/AIDS.

Prelimary results are available for the first month of the monitoring exercise, March, 2002. 101 HIV/AIDS stories were published in the eleven nationally-circulated daily newspapers that were monitored. These stories included 66 news stories, 24 feature articles, 10 opinion articles/interviews, and 1 editorial. Though every paper had at least one news item per day during the month, coverage was concentrated on particular days. Most of the stories appeared in the health section; feature-length articles were not products of reporters' individual initiative, but were culled from news items previously published or from news agencies or foreign publications. 42 out of the 101 stories focussed on awareness, 25 on prevention, 22 on treatment, and 12 on advocacy. From the perspective of researchers, these findings indicate the need for more advocacy to support the rights of People Living with AIDS (PLWA) and put an end to stigmatisation.

During that month, former American President Jimmy Carter and owner of Microsoft Bill Gates visited Nigeria on an awareness-raising tour; coverage of HIV/AIDS issues moved momentarily to the front pages of local newspapers. The study found that coverage of one of the major events of the tour, a presidential forum, was limited to brief, general, two-paragraph mentions in one or two newspapers. Project researchers explain attribute this fact to organisers' failure to consciously engage the media for coverage of the event. The study also found that newspaper correspondents often do not have time to provide detailed coverage of special events like conferences.

Researchers found that, while rules guiding the appropriate use of language in HIV/AIDS reporting were observed in many of the reports, there were still cases of violations (e.g., lack of attribution of the sources of some stories and poor identification contributing writers). Only a few cases of sensationalism were noted. Many feature-length stories were not accompanied by illustrative pictures; researchers ask the communications staff of NGOs and government agencies to supply the media with appropriate pictures. Use of cartoons, researchers claim, is another good way to communicate HIV/AIDS messages in the press.