CJ's revenge

Media, folklore, and the cultural construction of Aids

Datos Bibliográficos

ID7494459
AutoresElizabeth Bird (autor de correspondencia), S Elizabeth Bird (0009-0009-0085-0818)
Año1996
Volumen13
Número1
Páginas44-58
Fecha de publicación1996-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCritical Studies in Mass Communication (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0739-3180 • E-ISSN: 1529-5036
EditorialRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/15295039609366959
OpenAlexW2067546027
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas12
Referencias citadas7

On October 10, 1991, ABC's news magazine Prime Time live, retold a story that had been causing a sensation in Dallas since early September, when Ebony magazine published a letter from a writer signing herself CJ, Dallas, Texas. The writer claimed to be deliberately infecting up to four men a week with the AIDS virus. The letter led to a flood of calls to a local talk show host, and a major scare began in Dallas, fed by local, and then national news coverage. It was later exposed as a “hoax.” This paper examines in the CJ story as a product of oral folk tradition that had become transformed into “news.” News, like folklore, is a cultural construction, a narrative that telb a story about things of importance or interest, and reflecting and reinforcing cultural anxieties and concerns. Study of folkloric narrative construction adds an extra dimension to our understanding of news. The CJ incident was not really a hoax, in the sense of a deliberate misinformation campaign, or a case where the media were simply wrong. Rather, it was the coming together of anonymous rumors, tales, and legends, fed by oral tradition and media alike, and constructing a terrifying real story

Art · Folklore · Hoax · Literature · Media studies · Misinformation · Narrative · Paranormal · Political science · Romance · Rumor · Sociology · Storytelling · Media Studies and Communication · Music History and Culture · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · History · Law