Development of Media Coverage
In Libya, "La" magazine (issue 78) published its exposé about AIDS at the hospital, but was shut down. Initial Bulgarian coverage focused on a scandal in the wake of the arrests when the Bulgarian news journal "24 hours" of 24 February published an investigation of money laundering at Expomed entitled "How we lost USD 5,048,292 in Libya". The trial received almost no public attention outside Libya and Bulgaria until an account by Eric Favereau was published in the French paper Libération on 2 June 2000 entitled "Libye : Six Bulgares accusés d’être à l’origine de 393 cas de sida Assassins d’enfants ou boucs émissaires de la Libye ? " (Libya: six Bulgarians accused of causing 392 Aids cases - Child killers or Libya's Scapegoats?). Libya had requested help and France, Italy and Switzerland had received some of the sick children. Eighty children were sent to France in May 1999. The Swiss paper Neue Zuercher Zeitung followed with the article “Bulgarians as Scapegoats” and the Washington Times picked up the story. In April 2001 the trial gained brief attention after Muammar Gaddafi gave his speech at the African summit on HIV/AIDS implicating the CIA. Cold War era GRU defector Viktor Suvorov would claim on Radio Free Europe that the conspiracy theory espoused by Gaddafi about CIA creating HIV and letting it loose in Africa had been invented by the KGB and was still promoted by Russian secret services, who were controlling Libya. This theory was widely published throughout the Balkans in Serbian and Greek newspaper articles. On 2 July 2001 the Washington Post ran a story by Peter Finn, interviewing Prof. Luc Perrin. Perrin dismissed the allegations of a deliberate infection, and WHO spokesperson Melinda Henry told the Post that members of WHO missions in Libya in 1998 and 1999 felt that further study was necessary, but they “were not invited back.”
The case continued to receive minor attention until the conclusion of the second trial and the imposition of the death penalty on 6 May 2004, which provoked a major reaction, and worldwide television coverage.
Read more about this topic: HIV Trial In Libya
Famous quotes containing the words development of, development and/or media:
“I have an intense personal interest in making the use of American capital in the development of China an instrument for the promotion of the welfare of China, and an increase in her material prosperity without entanglements or creating embarrassment affecting the growth of her independent political power, and the preservation of her territorial integrity.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“... work is only part of a man’s life; play, family, church, individual and group contacts, educational opportunities, the intelligent exercise of citizenship, all play a part in a well-rounded life. Workers are men and women with potentialities for mental and spiritual development as well as for physical health. We are paying the price today of having too long sidestepped all that this means to the mental, moral, and spiritual health of our nation.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why—but the editorialists forget it—terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)