Kingdom Journalism

Communicating HIV and AIDS

• Posted by Steve K. on May 7th, 2007 filed in Writing
• Comment now »

At last week’s Evangelical Press Association conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Christianity Today editor Tim Morgan spoke on the topic of “Black Death: Why the HIV/AIDS Story Is Still Big.” He explained that people, in general, experience a “chronic state of compassion fatigue” towards HIV/AIDS, and:

advised avoiding a direct approach to the disease such as the popular problem-intervention structure but instead telling the story through counterintuitive ways.

For instance, instead of portraying the HIV/AIDS disease as simply a moral or scientific problem, Morgan advocates that writers tell the HIV/AIDS story through the lens of a relational pandemic where real-life people are left utterly devastated from losing mothers and fathers, husbands and wives.

“It is a relational pandemic; it spreads through relational networks,” emphasized Morgan. “So we need to understand that there is a relational component to this pandemic…. We have to have a relational strategy both as a church and as a journalist – that’s what it is going to take.”

Read the whole story