AIDS and the news media.
TL;DR: News reports on AIDS have appeared at a time of general public concern about health risks, and, like the coverage of risk, the reporting on AIDS has been controversial.
Abstract: News reports on AIDS have appeared at a time of general public concern about health risks, and, like the coverage of risk, the reporting on AIDS has been controversial. Perceptions of this disease have been linked to economic and personal stakes, professional ideologies, administrative responsibilities, and moral beliefs. It is from this perspective that news coverage of AIDS must be understood. The norms and practices of journalism, the technical uncertainties of risk evaluation, and the pressures placed on the media by various interests have influenced the reporting on this disease. However, media reports also shape the social context of the epidemic, affecting public perceptions, personal behavior, and policy agendas.
Citations
More filters
361 citations
TL;DR: Comparing the public's response to severe acute respiratory syndrome in Ontario, the other Canadian provinces, and the United States suggests that, even at a relatively low level of spread among the population, the SARS outbreak had a significant psychological and economic impact.
Abstract: Using data from 13 surveys of the public, this article compares the public's response to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Ontario (specifically, Toronto), the other Canadian provinces, and the United States, which had substantial differences in the number of SARS cases. Findings suggest that, even at a relatively low level of spread among the population, the SARS outbreak had a significant psychological and economic impact. They also suggest that the success of efforts to educate the public about the risk of SARS and appropriate precautions was mixed. Some of the community-wide problems with SARS might have been avoided with better communication by public health officials and clinicians.
335 citations
TL;DR: This article found that the major fund-raising triggers involved media representations of the indigency of aid recipients, portrayals of people helping themselves, and highly emotive advertising imagery, such depictions seemingly exerted powerful influences on donation decisions.
Abstract: Two hundred members of the public were interviewed in high street and railway station locations in central London to ascertain the considerations that encourage them to donate generously to a disaster relief fund‐raising appeal. It emerged that the major fund‐raising triggers involved media representations of the indigency of aid recipients, portrayals of people helping themselves, and highly emotive advertising imagery. Although they were potentially patronising and demeaning to disaster victims, such depictions seemingly exerted powerful influences on donation decisions. Factors discouraging donations included media reports of unfair aid distributions, warfare or internal insurrection, and inefficiency in the relief operation. Combined fund‐raising efforts covering several organisations were viewed more favourably than individual charity initiatives. State endorsements of particular campaigns exerted little influence. Some but not all of the variables known to determine levels of donations to charity in...
100 citations
TL;DR: This work presents a systematic approach for document analysis in health policy research called the READ approach, which provides practical guidance on gaining the most out of documents and ensuring rigour in document analysis.
Abstract: Document analysis is one of the most commonly used and powerful methods in health policy research. While existing qualitative research manuals offer direction for conducting document analysis, there has been little specific discussion about how to use this method to understand and analyse health policy. Drawing on guidance from other disciplines and our own research experience, we present a systematic approach for document analysis in health policy research called the READ approach: (1) ready your materials, (2) extract data, (3) analyse data and (4) distil your findings. We provide practical advice on each step, with consideration of epistemological and theoretical issues such as the socially constructed nature of documents and their role in modern bureaucracies. We provide examples of document analysis from two case studies from our work in Pakistan and Niger in which documents provided critical insight and advanced empirical and theoretical understanding of a health policy issue. Coding tools for each case study are included as Supplementary Files to inspire and guide future research. These case studies illustrate the value of rigorous document analysis to understand policy content and processes and discourse around policy, in ways that are either not possible using other methods, or greatly enrich other methods such as in-depth interviews and observation. Given the central nature of documents to health policy research and importance of reading them critically, the READ approach provides practical guidance on gaining the most out of documents and ensuring rigour in document analysis.
98 citations
TL;DR: Echoing similar stories in other Western media, in Australian coverage the idea of criminal intent converges with the symbolic weight of black sexuality and African origins to produce a 'monstrous' masculinity, which at the local level taps into contemporary racial tensions and conjures an imagined Anglo-heterosexuality at once vulnerable to and safe from HIV in a globalised epidemic and world.
Abstract: In the early HIV epidemic, Western media coverage encouraged the idea that infection was linked to 'other' identities located outside the 'mainstream'; outside 'proper' heterosexuality. Today, however, HIV has become repositioned as a global heterosexual epidemic. Analyses show that since the 1990s Western media have shifted away from blame and hysteria to an increasingly routinised reporting of HIV as a health story and social justice issue. But recent years have seen the emergence of a new media story in many Western countries; the criminal prosecution for HIV-related offences, and with it a reframing of old discourses of 'innocence' and 'guilt', but now with heterosexuals in focus. We examine this story in recent domestic media coverage in Australia, a country where heterosexual HIV transmission is rare by global comparison. Echoing similar stories in other Western media, in Australian coverage the idea of criminal intent converges with the symbolic weight of black sexuality and African origins to produce a 'monstrous' masculinity, which at the local level taps into contemporary racial tensions and, in so doing, conjures an imagined Anglo-heterosexuality at once vulnerable to and safe from HIV in a globalised epidemic and world.
87 citations
Cites background from "AIDS and the news media."
...Still, many researchers agree that the mainstream media play a critical role in shaping public perceptions of HIV (Nelkin 1991, Lupton 1999, Rogers et al. 1991, Swain 2005)....
[...]
References
More filters
Book•
01 Apr 1987
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explain why accurate science reporting is important, describe public relations ploys, and look at biases, constraints and myth making in science journalism, and discuss the role of bias in science reporting.
Abstract: Explains why accurate science reporting is important, describes public relations ploys, and looks at biases, constraints and myth making in science journalism.
871 citations
TL;DR: The authors need to understand that AIDS is and will remain a provisional and deeply problematic signifier and use what science gives us in ways that are selective, self-conscious and pragmatic.
Abstract: (1987). AIDS, homophobia and biomedical discourse: An epidemic of signification. Cultural Studies: Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 263-305.
459 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1987
383 citations
"AIDS and the news media." refers background in this paper
...In contrast, the San Francisco Chronicle hired a full-time AIDS reporter, Randy Shilts, in 1982 (Shilts 1987)....
[...]
TL;DR: This article examined how informed citizens choose one policy option over another on nuclear energy and whether informed citizens use a decision calculus fundamentally different from that of the uninformed, finding that knowledgeable citizens rely heavily on ideology, which also colors their cost-benefit calculations, while the unknowledgeable draw on their generalized outlooks toward technology and the cues provided by groups involved in the nuclear energy controversy.
Abstract: The rise of a new set of complex and highly consequential issues has generated a heated debate about the place of the citizen in the decision-making process. This article examines how citizens choose one policy option over another on nuclear energy and whether informed citizens use a decision calculus fundamentally different from that of the uninformed. Knowledgeable citizens, we find, rely heavily on ideology, which also colors their cost-benefit calculations, while the unknowledgeable draw on their generalized outlooks toward technology and the cues provided by groups involved in the nuclear energy controversy.
156 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1989
TL;DR: Some of the blame for the ravages of AIDS must lie with members of the media who failed to adequately warn of the crisis because they believed that deaths of gay men and drug addicts were not worth reporting.
Abstract: Why did AIDS become news? Not because young men were dying from it. Not because the death rate was terrifyingly high. Not because it presented a fascinating medical puzzle. It became news only when journalists decided that AIDS posed a threat to themselves, their families, and friends. "Covering the Plague" is about how news gets made in America. Why were the nation's top doctors so inept at sending out the word about the epidemic? How did an iconoclastic gay publisher come to have such influence that the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control offered him one of the most important exclusives of the epidemic? How did the medical journals use their clout to control the news and sometimes distort it? AIDS has now become a staple item of the news and a part of American consciousness. Much of the credit for this change lies with journalists whose early exposure to those infected with the disease forced them to report this major story. At the same time, Kinsella asserts, some of the blame for the ravages of AIDS must lie with members of the media who failed to adequately warn of the crisis because they believed that deaths of gay men and drug addicts were not worth reporting.
112 citations
"AIDS and the news media." refers background in this paper
...The case of AIDS illustrates how such social factors converge with the constraints of journalism and the pressure from advocates to influence the style and content of the news (Kinsella 1989)....
[...]