OP/ED: Safe sex and moral circuses - forgotten cause meets predictable effect?

Roughly half the population will experience an STD at some time in their lives. The topic of safe sex in the media has shown up in various ways recently, none of which seem to indicate any sense of urgency in dealing with the various STD pandemics.

We’re all well aware that government, business and media’s approach to health has created an Earthly paradise of decisive social leadership and policies in which all people are free of care. Bliss reigns in a world of perfect health. This is clearly a result of high morality. Plato would have been proud. The morals are a damn sight less important than the health problems: opinions are many and various, but health has taken a back seat to “morals” in news values, and that has affected policies and health practices. If it's not news, don't expect anyone to do anything about it. We have people pinning medals on themselves for their moral stances, and the lucky recipients of all this concern keep right on dying. Maybe the message just isn’t getting through. Maybe being that moral affects how people react to information. Let’s just say that supporting safe sex is about as moral as obeying road rules. It’s a social obligation, not a character reference. Media has an obligation to serve the public interest in health, and it isn’t doing it. A quick search of “safe sex” (Boolean search, last 3 months) led to some pretty pathetic results. Government and education sites came back with extraordinarily low results, only a few thousand each. Only .org sites even made it to six figures and that was only 303,000. Abstinence weighed in at 5.4 million results. One interpretation of that would be that most of the current generation may never have heard of safe sex in any coherent form. (Just for the record, "protected sex" came out even worse, from all sources. As sampling, that means that even in jingle form, hook line advertising, the terminology isn't being used much.) If I can allow some cynicism to taint this pristine prose, the media approach to safe sex is an intriguing example of subjects-by-association. As a source of information, it’s about as selective as anything could reasonably hope to be. I had a look at two of the protagonists in the current Evolve advertising campaign by Trojan. Fox does run news with safe sex references, not banner headlines, obviously, but where the topics lead in relation to safe sex is a bit debatable. This is mainly op/ed, and OK, that’s how they feel about these issues, which it’s their right to express. In all fairness to Fox, they do have a whole page on sexual health, and at least one of the articles listed flies in the face of the “abstinence” angle so noticeable in their op/ed pieces, and says it doesn't work. It’s a huge database, and I don’t want to unfairly accuse them of not covering the subject objectively regarding actual news. This is strictly news, and the editorial element doesn’t seem to intrude. Fox obviously does have an editorial position, which is kept and labeled as such in its reporting and commentaries. CBS News yielded 15 pages of results for “safe sex”, the most recent of which was June 30, 2006. “Sexual health” led to 50+ pages, mainly of the anecdotal/spice-up-your-sex-life variety. Doesn’t seem to be an editorial issue. I’m hoping I didn’t miss anything glaring about CBS editorial policy, but there was no indication of major policy issues. NBC generated a non Boolean search result of 6 items, one of which was a forum netspeak epic. The Boolean search came back with a nil result. STD came back with 3 results, including one very strange sounding relationship in a forum. Maybe they have something else on their minds. At some point in trudging through the immense amount of old news and outdated information I decided I’d found most of what I was looking for, such as it was. One thing that also became very clear in this massive amount of information sifting is that STD statistics aren’t under any obligation to be well organized. Even epidemiology sites were notably useless in stats-finding. I’m not trying to be “right” about a global health crisis, which would be a contradiction in terms, bordering on immoral, by my standards. I’m trying to establish that health isn’t treated as a major issue in the same sense as something like environmental news. So the moral high ground is usually uninhabited by major media, except when there’s a position to be taken relative to self interest. It doesn’t take any great prophetic talent to see where this approach leads. (Use page search to locate “safe sex” refs directly; some of these pages are multi-topic) Fox on abstinence and abortion article Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly, who I’m starting to think really isn’t Hillary Clinton in drag. Fox sexual health page CBS News search on “safe sex” NIAID report from 1998. They’re far from being the only offenders in terms of antiquated stats. Interesting mainly for what you can find out ten or more years later, regardless of any interest in more current information. National Center for Health Statistics useful info, but from 2004.