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The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has said that South African audiences are not bored with AIDS reporting, as is popularly believed by most journalists.
A month of research on the impact of HIV/AIDS reporting on poor and semiliterate people in Cato Manor, an informal settlement near the port city of Durban on the east coast, revealed that 98 percent of people in the area would welcome more reporting on the epidemic in print and broadcast media.
A local newspaper, Business Day, said this dispelled the notion of "AIDS fatigue" - that readers and viewers are saturated with and turned off by HIV/AIDS - a reason sometimes used by editors to explain why they don't regularly cover the subject.
"It may be that journalists, coming most often from that sector of society that feels relatively immune from the disease, are bored with the subject," noted the paper.
This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions