Media Attention to Global AIDS Epidemic

As Wellings and Field note in their book Stopping AIDS: AIDS/HIV Public Education and the Mass Media in Europe (1996), much of the media attention surrounding AIDS has been targeted at general populations, often using fear or humor to inform people about the virus and how to stop its transmission (the image at right represents one way in which two are morbidly combined). However interesting such media might be, analyzing this is perhaps not useful in a discussion regarding agenda setting – these ads arguably are a result of successful agenda setting rather than a catalyst for it. While they get the attention of “average people,” they are traditionally not aimed at organizations or governments who are in a position to create major social and political change.

More important than public service campaigns, then, is story coverage by major newspapers, and more important than either fear or humor, in getting the attention of these major news sources, is the question of expertise/credibility and resources. Miller and Williams (1993) have thus note that media is not a neutral arena. Different groups have different levels of access to media based on the credibility and expertise they are perceived as having, as well as the amount of resources they have available to them. As a result, organizations have to develop media strategies with which “to influence relevant agendas” in their favored direction (127). Government has had success in both these regards, and thus were strong in 1986 and 1987 in launching advertising campaigns intended to educate the public about HIV/AIDS, Other “alternative” groups such as gay activist organizations have had more difficulty in accessing the media, and need to rely heavily on statistics and scientific evidence in order to be seen as legitimate sources. (Miller and Williams 1993).

Regarding one such group that has had success in shaping the agenda through media coverage, Miller and Williams suggest that:

Sources which may be used as experts by the media can use their credibility with journalists to use their own agendas. It is often forgotten that even eminent scientists and doctors sometimes can be their own best publicists. One senior AIDS doctor talked of having used his authority as an ‘expert’ to use the media to ‘exert leverage on the government’. He also said that media interventions in the early 1980s ‘were very effective, not in getting money personally for research or anything, but in getting money put into health education and into services’. (1993: 132)

A Lexis-Nexis search for HIV/AIDS for both the 1980s and the 1990s resulted in over 3000 search results in all news sources, indicating that the issue was being discussed by media sources. Interestingly, however, including search terms to indicate a discussion of AIDS as a global epidemic reveal no results throughout the 1980s, but 897 for the 1990s. During the 2000s, the same search resulted in over 3000 news stories. This indicates a shift in the way the issue was framed from one decade to the next, from a US-based issue to one of global concern. The vast majority of news stories came in the second half of the 1990s and the 2000s. This does not seem to correlate exactly with other events in world government, since the first International AIDS Conference was held in 1987. However, it is interesting to note that coverage of AIDS as a global epidemic picked up substantially in 1995, the same year as the formation of the UN Programme on HIV/AIDS.

In regards to HIV/AIDS, the media appears to both respond to major events in the global agenda setting arena (as the previous example indicates), but also does much work in shaping the global agenda. For example, Human Rights Watch did not pick up HIV/AIDS as a campaign issue until 2001 (discovered using the WayBack Machine, but there were over 100 sources documented throughout the 1990s discussing AIDS as a global human rights issue. Much of the coverage dealt with activist groups advocating for the human rights of people afflicted with AIDS. In this case, one might suspect that media coverage of these actions might have prompted Human Rights Watch to take up the issue (which in turn prompted an increase in human rights framing in media coverage from 2000 to 2005 – 761 pieces in that five-year period alone, many of which were related to HRW news releases). Interestingly, 2001 was also the year that the UN General Assembly adopted a declaration of commitment regarding the relationship between HIV/AIDS and human rights. However, given the limited data available, it is difficult to tease out how much of a role the media played in getting AIDS on the global human rights agenda, and how much that was simply due to the efforts of activists. Most likely, it was a confluence of the two forces that brought attention to that particular way of framing the issue.

Miller and Williams. 1993. Negotiating HIV/AIDS information: Agendas, media strategies and the news. In Elridge (ed.) Getting the Message: News, Truth and Power, Taylor & Francis. 126-144.

Wellings and Field, 1996. Stopping AIDS: AIDS/HIV Public Education and the Mass Media in Europe. London: Lomgman.