CJ's revenge: Media, folklore, and the cultural construction of AIDS

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 tells 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.