Danny Schechter

I

can just hear some Hollywood exec wondering if it has "series

potential" while watching the dramatic showdown in the latest episode of

the Elián González tug-of-war. On April 22 federal agents in a long overdue

and overdrawn response "rescued" the six-year-old from a politically

driven soap opera and family feud. He was reunited with his father, a reunion

that enjoyed support from the majority of people living outside the

Castro-hating hothouse of Miami’s Little Havana.

The

media was omnipresent, of course, live and in color, milking the drama for all

it was worth. On many networks "all Elián all the time" had months

ago become a programming staple — coverage that mostly failed to take a

critical look at the vicious 30-year U.S. embargo of Cuba that created the

conditions leading to Elián’s mother’s "escape" in the first place.

His first rescue, at sea, had long since been overshadowed by a hostage

situation created by his relatives and their fanatical supporters among

right-wing exile groups. The best interests of the child were not necessarily

considered in their best interest. (One unreported aside: A Cuba-expert friend

of mine who was shuttling between Havana, Miami and Washington to resolve this

crisis told me of an earlier encounter with Elián. He was asked if he wanted to

go home. His response was a question indicating the nature of this six-year-old’s

fears. "Will I have to go back the way I came, on a raft?" he

reportedly asked.

The

major complaint in most TV newsrooms was undoubtedly with the timing of the

raid. Why couldn’t Attorney General Reno have waited until primetime to act, so

that they could have enjoyed a bigger audience? Instead, the marshals moved with

militarized speed – and in inappropriate combat gear – just in time to assure

attention during Saturday morning children’s TV shows, thus traumatizing a whole

nation of kids with images of heavily armed men pointing scary weapons at

unarmed civilians. I guess a Justice Department that brought us the Waco debacle

still doesn’t know how to act in a less heavy-handed manner. One AP photo of a

gun pointed toward one kid effectively undercut their moral standing. They have

a way of blowing it even when they try to do right.

As

I thought about the child’s rescue, in this month of Passover and Easter, with

biblical tales of a people’s exodus to freedom and Christ’s resurrection, my

mind drifted elsewhere. It took me back to another land and to tens of millions

of children without fathers or mothers, who have no federal marshals to rescue

them and far less media attention paid to their plight.

Six

years ago this month, I was on the assignment of a lifetime, documenting Nelson

Mandela’s presidential campaign in South Africa’s first democratic elections. I

was there at his invitation, as a result of the body of TV work our company

Globalvision [LINK to Globalvision.org] had produced on the apartheid issue over

the years. Our South Africa Now public television series was still on the minds

and in the memory of many South Africans forced into exile during the long years

of their fight for liberation. They provided access to us, although our film,

"Countdown to Freedom: Ten Days That Changed South Africa," was

independent in its approach.

In

the euphoria of that moment, as a long-disenfranchised people lined up to vote

on April 27, 1994, sometimes standing for hours in queues snaking through the

townships, there was a sense that here at last the forces of democracy were

triumphing over the forces of racism and repression. Mandela was seen as the

rescuer of his people. The world’s best-known political prisoner went on to

become president. For many South Africans, and for the people who marched for

them in many lands, it was like being in a dream state. The world had turned

upside down. White rule was finally over in South Africa. And the transition was

largely peaceful.

The

world media was out in force to cover that spectacle, but focused on

personalities, not the struggle that they led. Their "liberation," as

we can see now, was only partial. And the "victory," only one part of

a more complicated truth. "The issues were black and white, the ‘baddies’

and ‘goodies’ easily distinguishable thanks to variations in melanin

deficiency," noted the veteran South Africa watcher, journalist David

Beresford in the Johannesburg Mail & Guardian. "When [Mandela] walked

out of the prison gates, the moment confirmed those certainties — the

anticipated moral victory offering a fitting climax to what seemed like a

morality tale enjoyed by millions watching television. In retrospect it was

something of a fake orgasm in fairyland, because truth is not so easy."

Needless

to say, there is never any one single truth, but certainly it is true that

journalists around then, including myself, were not as aware as we might have

been of the genocide about to be unleashed in Africa, in Rwanda. Most of the

media missed the buildup to that manmade calamity and the UN’s mishandling of

it. That story went mostly unexplained until years later.

Also

largely unreported was another holocaust in the making in South Africa itself,

the HIV-AIDS pandemic. While I was chronicling the country’s hopeful political

transition, a tragedy of cataclysmic proportions was brewing out of global-media

view.

With

at least 3.5 million South Africans infected by HIV, that epidemic can no longer

be ignored. Part of the beloved country is no longer crying; it is dying, and in

droves. When I started covering South Africa in 1967 a state of emergency was in

effect. Now, with the death toll from AIDS rising, it has returned — although

not formally — as a state of urgency. At its core are ten million young

children like Elián, only these have been orphaned by AIDS and for the most

part are still off the media radar screen. While Newsweek and CNN do deserve

credit for reporting the AIDS orphans story, far more is needed.

These

children are relegated to the back pages because "big" journalism has

an affinity for Big Medicine and its top-down way of seeing AIDS in Africa only

in medical terms, as a disease to be fought with prevention, high-tech medicines

and research oriented toward finding "the cure" a.k.a. "a magic

bullet." Yet in countries that lack an adequate healthcare infrastructure,

legitimate questions can be raised about whether treatments developed in the

West are equally suitable in Africa. The one African leader who is doing some of

that questioning has become a target for editorial denunciations of his motives

and judgment.

It

is South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela’s chosen successor, who

is at the center of that controversy. Mbeki has been questioning the link

between HIV and AIDS, and consulting with dissident scientists who have been

virtually run out of the medical world for questioning orthodox understandings.

Last week, a letter he wrote to President Clinton and other world leaders

explaining his stance was leaked to the Washington Post [LINK to letter?]. A day

letter the newspaper denounced him editorially for questioning mainstream AIDS

thinking, calling it "a ludicrous waste of precious time and a cruel hoax

on his suffering people." The subtext is that African leaders are to blame

for the spread of AIDS by not doing enough – a perspective as popular in some

liberal media circles as the notion among racists that oversexed Africans have

brought the problem on themselves. It is always easier to blame the victim than

look more deeply into how an epidemic spread. It is significant that it was the

Village Voice, an independent news weekly, that won the Pulitzer Prize for its

reporting on AIDS, not the Post or the New York Times (which also took an

editoral swipe at Mbeki).

One

challenge here is for both the media and medical worlds to recognize how

complicated this fight is. Many African societies are still in denial about

AIDS, uncomfortable with even talking about sex within their families, trapped

in deeply ingrained cultural taboos. Some governments even contend that these

cultural traditions must be "respected" by outsiders and AIDS workers.

To this, South African AIDS activists like David R. Patient say: "You may

very well be right in your argument, but you will end up being DEAD right."

In an article in the Citizen newspaper out of Pretoria, he insists: "We

either dramatically change our cultures or we will end up burying them."

Adding

to the problem is the failure on the part of many media observers to recognize

that the rapid spread of AIDS in the world needs to be reframed as a global

public-health emergency, then anchored in a health and human rights framework.

As Joyce Pekane, a vice president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions

(COSATU), put it in a recent speech at a conference of South Africans living

with AIDS: "The rapid spread of the disease is related to poverty and the

lack of access to socioeconomic rights such as housing, clean water and health

care." This structural problem, in a country where 37.5 percent of the

population is unemployed, and where rape and social breakdown is widespread, is

a major factor that makes it hard for people to change behaviors that puts them

at risk The pandemic spreads in other countries for similar reasons, along with

wars and refugee crises.

Inextricably

connected to all this is the enormous spread of the number of children orphaned

by AIDS worldwide. These kids, unlike Elián, do not have families to fight over

them. But they desperately need rescuers too, as well as major media to tell

their stories. The scale and implications of this problem are huge and

frightening, as I learned by working with MediaChannel advisor Albina du

Boisouvray, whose FXB Association [LINK: www.fxb.org] is focusing on the plight

of these orphans. The organization funds research at Harvard’s FXB Health and

Human Rights Center [LINK: ], mounts field projects in 13 countries and does

policy advocacy among governments and international agencies. Du Boisouvray’s

own work began after she lost her only son, François, a helicopter rescue

pilot, in an air crash in Africa. Now she is trying to mobilize interest from a

media that for months seems to have time for only one child – the "raft

boy."

We

have had too much attention paid to one child for the wrong reasons, and too

little paid to millions of others for the right ones.

Danny

Schechter produced 10 documentaries with GlobalVision, where he serves as vice

president and executive producer. He is the executive editor of MediaChannel

and author of "News Dissector," a collection of his columns and

writings from Electronpress.com.