News Release

Science, Popular Culture And Narrative Allure:AIDS On General Hospital

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- "General Hospital" does a better job portraying AIDS than does network news. That observation should tell scientists and physicians that getting significant messages to the public requires a greater respect for and cooperation with popular mass media, says a University of Illinois researcher.

The power of narrative in television movies, talk shows, sitcoms and even sensationalist media is being overlooked as a primary message-carrier to the general public, said Paula Treichler, a professor in the U. of I. College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign.

The public's ambivalence toward science, she said today in a speech to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is shaped both by the mainstream media's narrow, results-oriented coverage and by the scientific community's general dismissal of popular mass media.

Nevertheless, she said, "People do use science in their lives. They try to piece together complicated realities and contradictory messages involving the food we eat, diseases we get, the environment we live in, and the meaning of an epidemic like AIDS. People use the resources they have available to construct a vision of the world that makes sense for them and lets them live their lives. Useful resources are as likely to come from entertainment television as from recognized authorities. This is a fact that the scientific and medical communities need to acknowledge and work with, not deplore."

Treichler, who also has appointments in the U. of I. Institute of Communications Research and women's studies program, is co-editor of "The Visible Woman," a book published last year by the New York University Press about imaging technologies, gender and science. In it, Treichler and Catherine Warren of North Carolina State University provide a detailed examination of media coverage of AIDS and its impact on women.

Treichler also is the author of "How to Have a Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS," to be published this spring by Duke University Press. She has studied the cultural dimensions of AIDS for more than a decade.

"Physicians again and again rebuke patients who say they saw a television program about something seemingly pertinent to their own situations," Treichler said. "Rather than asking what they learned and why they are mentioning it, physicians belittle their comments. This rejection shows the failure of science and medicine to respect other sources of knowledge and to grasp the power of other kinds of narratives."

If scientists and physicians, whose views of facts and evidence are based on laboratory work and professional journals, want to better engage the public about science, she said, "then there are things about the media that they are going to have to understand."

People grow up exposed to the narratives of numerous media genres, including novels, academic journals, movies and television, she said. "These narratives and the way we respond to them exert a power that in a sense is content free and not dependent upon objective truth," she said. "A powerful narrative can make a case for a certain state of affairs that may outweigh more orthodox or traditional evidence. Science must learn to appreciate such narratives and work with them, not devalue them."

An excellent example, she said, is ABC's "General Hospital," a daytime soap opera with a loyal following. The show in April 1995 introduced an AIDS storyline, which continued to play out over an extended period. "Though other soaps have featured characters with HIV or AIDS, usually as one-dimensional figures of threat to the major characters, "General Hospital" made AIDS a central storyline to educate and explore the meanings of AIDS," Treichler said.

The storyline was coupled with multiple and often conflicting perspectives of the disease, regular medical updates, fund-raising events on and off the screen, extensive media coverage, and tie-in documentaries such as ABC "Afterschool Specials" on AIDS aimed at adolescents. "The driving and unifying force for those efforts was the power of the soap narrative to hold viewers' attention, stimulate questions and make them care," she said.

The AIDS theme -- built around long-time character Robin Scorpio (played by Kimberly McCullough) -- was introduced after Robin, as a teen-ager, had a romance with Stone Cates (Michael Sutton). "Stone arrives as a terrific-looking guy from out of town, a former street kid, and they fall in love," Treichler said. "By the time he develops symptoms and is diagnosed, viewers have accepted Stone as a young romantic hunk and are invested in the relationship. This becomes a vehicle for education, involvement and suspense."

The show vividly portrayed the diagnosis and frustrating course of Stone's illness and finally his death. Then it revealed that Robin was infected, and viewers continue to learn through her of new treatment breakthroughs and of other developments. "Overall, the show provides an intimate window on the epidemic, showing the impact on a community of a life-threatening, transmissible disease," Treichler said.

"'General Hospital' has gone where network news cannot: telling a story of AIDS that unfolds over time and has multiple meanings and implications in people's lives," she said. "Sometimes telling the facts won't tell the story. The story sometimes is better with popular images and narratives that get people caring, thinking and talking to each other."

The AIDS storyline on "General Hospital," Treichler added, was avidly discussed on the Internet, often with scientists, physicians and people with AIDS as participants.

Scientists should be looking at multiple ways to represent their work and put their findings in context, she said. To help them better understand the media's role and its many strategies for telling science stories, she suggested that such journals as Science -- published weekly by the AAAS -- and the journal of the American Medical Association regularly highlight and evaluate noteworthy media treatments of science and medicine.

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