Moral Threats and Dangerous Desires - AIDS in the News Media

Abstract

The role of the media has been a significant element in the construction of AIDS as an issue in a number of different ways. In the UK the media focus of politicians and of the AIDS 'policy community' in the mid 1980s helped raise AIDS to the level of a major policy concern. Subsequently the 'anti-AIDS alliance', arguing against the policy primacy of AIDS from a number of different angles, has also found life in media presentations. Much media analysis, however, has focused on the supposed relationship between the media and popular responses to AIDS, castigating the tabloid press in particular for disseminating and inculcating 'homophobia' and 'moral panic' among its readership. Deborah Lupton's study focuses on AIDS in the Australian press, but it is well grounded both in the developing school of AIDS media studies, and, more importantly, in the theoretical underpinning of media studies in general. In introductory chapters, for example, she considers broader contextual issues such as how news is constructed; the role of discourse analysis; and of the role of the audience for news. The bulk of the book, however, consists of 3 case studies over time from the Australian press. These are the early years of AIDS reporting in Australia, when the syndrome first emerged as an issue, much as it did elsewhere through 'gay plague' formulations, and through the blood issue. Lupton then deals with what she calls the 'Grim Reaper' period of AIDS reporting, the time in the spring of 1987, when the Australian government took up AIDS as a priority issue through a major publicity campaign, much as the UK government did through its 'Don't Die of Ignorance' campaign. This marked, as Lupton notes, an intensification and dramatization of AIDS coverage in the media unlikely ever to be repeated. Her third case study, of AIDS reporting in 1990, indeed confirms that conclusion. Never again were the peaks of 1987 to be reached; and AIDS reporting was marked by a plurality of subjects, many of which served to distance the readership from viewing the disease as relevant to themselves. One constant remained the value placed on the battles of medical science to conquer the syndrome.Lupton's concluding analysis is on two levels. She highlights ways in which the Australian response has differed from elsewhere. Australia had the advantage of forewarning, of a Federal Labour Government which had held power since 1983, and lacked a strong New Right pro-family lobby. It did not have the degree of public discussion around the issue of the reality of heterosexual spread. Loss of interest proved more significant than high levels of controversy. At a more theoretical level, Lupton argues that prevailing media discourses have drawn on notions of blame and sin and of risk as a moral concept, and have 'policed desire' as effectively as the state. In several ways I found the book unsatisfactory. Take methodology for a start. Lupton has some discussion of Berelson and other theorists of content analysis, but nowhere does she explain what her own methodology actually was. Counting news items clearly formed part, but what else was done? How did the three case studies differ? They appear to have been carried out using different means of accessing the media, in one instance the use of a press cuttings collection. Yet Lupton does not discuss how this may have affected her results. The opening chapters show a sophisticated knowledge of some aspects of theories of media effect, yet these are not applied in the final analysis. The ultimate conclusion seems to be the old Frankfurt one of the media as the agent of social control. Yet, as historians such as Charles Rosenberg have argued, populations have their own, historically constructed, views of epidemic and infectious disease. The question is how media messages interact, rather than simply structure them. So audience, in terms of general population effect, is neglected. So, too is the structure of news. The analysis here focuses entirely on 'manifest content', rather than looking, as the Glasgow AIDS and the media study did, at the role of context, at the way messages are produced. And audience in terms of the impact of politicians and policy processes is also not part of the study. Nevertheless, it is still valuable to have the snapshot analyses of AIDS reporting in Australia and to see similarities and differences with the British response. newline˜Virginia Berridge