A Content Analysis
OVERVIEW
On August 8, 1982, in an article entitled "A Disease's Spread Provokes Anxiety," The New York Times brought its readers up to date on a growing health crisis in the homosexual community that was baffling medical science. While The Times had previously reported on a disease causing opportunistic infections in gay men, this was the first time the term acquired immune deficiency syndrome or A.I.D.S. -- the punctuation had not yet been dropped -- appeared in the nation's "newspaper of record." Later that same year, The Washington Post joined The Times in reporting on the death of an infant who had received a blood transfusion from an AIDS-afflicted donor. With that, a second major national newspaper was officially in the business of covering the AIDS story.
Over the next three years, the mainstream media confronted the challenge of reporting on a deadly and mysterious new health problem in a responsible manner -- to inform but not inflame, to educate but not alarm. At that time, nearly everyone had heard of the disease, but many people were uninformed or misinformed about how it was transmitted. A June 1983 Newsweek poll found that fully nine in 10 (91%) of Americans over 18 had heard of AIDS, but also found that four in 10 either believed it was possible to contract the disease through casual contact (25%); or were unsure whether the infection could be passed this way (16%).
During this period, AIDS stories made ever more regular appearances in newspapers and on television news broadcasts. Over 150 AIDS stories were broadcast by the three major TV networks' evening news programs in 1985 -- more than double the combined total of AIDS stories broadcast in 1983 and 1984. (1) These initial years of press coverage of AIDS were marked by stories that often focused on the dramatic aspects of the disease, e.g., its progressive nature, the death toll among higher-risk groups, and its potential to spread to the public at large. Over the next 10 years, media coverage of AIDS moved well beyond its early focus, with the content of the reporting often strongly influenced by major breaking news pushing AIDS to the top of the news agenda.
This study's findings generally speak favorably about media performance in covering the AIDS story over the past decade. Overall, what the press did best was to maintain broad-based coverage -- AIDS did not become a political story, or a story focused solely on homosexuals or I.V. drug users. Instead, AIDS coverage tended to examine the disease's impact on multiple groups and communities; or put a human face to the disease to demonstrate AIDS impact on individuals and their families.
(see Figure 1: Story Perspective Of Aids Coverage 1985-1996)
(see Figure 2: Groups And Communities As Focus Of Aids Stories)
One less positive finding, the press covered AIDS almost exclusively as a domestic story. Overall, only 4% of all stories were filed from a non-U.S. dateline, and the sole recurring lead with any international component involved AIDS as a U.S.-Immigration issue (1%). Not surprisingly, the American public tends to overestimate U.S. AIDS cases as a percentage of all cases worldwide. A 1995 Kaiser Family Foundation/Princeton Survey Research Associates survey found that 51% of U.S. adults thought that half or more of AIDS cases occur in this country. The actual figure is much lower (35% to 40% of all cases worldwide).
During the earliest years examined within this study, AIDS was generally not mentioned in a news story unless the story was focused on AIDS. Of all news stories sampled for 1987 with any mention of AIDS, two-thirds (69%) had AIDS as the primary focus, while one-third (31%) made only a passing reference to the disease. As time went on, news coverage and public knowledge of AIDS increased; and news stories became more and more likely to mention AIDS as just one of a litany of society's problems, together with homelessness, substance abuse, etc. By the year 1994, only three in 10 (30%) of all stories sampled with a reference to AIDS had AIDS as the primary focus, while a full seven in 10 (70%) mentioned AIDS in the process of reporting on something else.
(see Figure 3: Is Aids Principal Focus Of Story?)
Over time, news stories about AIDS also became somewhat shorter in length, and more likely to be found in sports, lifestyle, or other "soft news" sections of the newspaper or broadcast; and the coverage became more celebrity driven.
(see Figure 4: Length Of Print Stories 1985-1996)
The changing nature of media coverage, however, was not simply a case of the press trading the serious for the superficial. In fact, it evolved with the story. Print and broadcast media devoted the greatest portion of its AIDS coverage to information about transmission and prevention in the mid- to late 1980s, when the public's learning curve showed it was most in need of such information. By 1989, the public's level of knowledge on many aspects of AIDS transmission had topped out. While AIDS advocates argued that more needed to be done to encourage people to protect themselves from HIV infection, it was not simply a matter of the media providing more information -- something had to happen to capture the public's attention.
That event occurred in 1991 when Magic Johnson made the stunning announcement that he was HIV-positive and was immediately retiring from the NBA. It resulted in an unprecedented volume of AIDS coverage by the media -- 259 stories focused on AIDS, compared with less than 100 stories within any other week analyzed. The media responded to the Magic Johnson announcement with a record number of news stories about AIDS prevention and protection. Johnson's decision to become a spokesperson to promote AIDS awareness and safe sex provided a means to directly link background stories on prevention with the week's major news story. To this day, Magic Johnson remains a compelling spokesperson in the fight against AIDS. The 1995 Kaiser Family Foundation/Princeton Survey Research Associates survey identified Johnson and Elizabeth Taylor as the two individuals most recognized by the public as national leaders in this area (5% each); and among Black Americans, Johnson is particularly likely to be cited as a leader (14%).
After this major news event, AIDS coverage was never the same. Celebrity activities, including fundraisers, became an integral part of the story. AIDS became an issue for reporters on the sports beat as well as those in national affairs or health and science. In fact, the two biggest AIDS-related stories so far in 1996 were both in the domain of sports -- Magic Johnson's return to the NBA and Tommy Morrison's banishment from professional boxing after he tested HIV-positive.
These are among the principal findings of the Kaiser Family Foundation's AIDS Media Monitoring Project, designed by the Foundation and Princeton Survey Research Associates and conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates. The project set out to examine the coverage devoted to AIDS/HIV issues in the nation's daily print and broadcast news outlets and to measure the changes in coverage that occurred over time. An important additional task -- to determine the effects of major AIDS news events believed to trigger increased media coverage of the disease -- was also one of the study's objectives.
To that end, this content analysis project examined over 3,100 stories in which the terms AIDS or HIV were used, that appeared in selected newspapers and network broadcasts during 34 designated weeks between 1985 and 1996. The evening news programs of the three major television networks (ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News) were monitored, as well as three nationally distributed newspapers: The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post. In addition to these national media outlets, two regional newspapers were selected: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch to represent local media in America's heartland; and The San Francisco Chronicle, to represent local media serving a geographic area that was particularly touched by the AIDS crisis. (2)
Two methods of selection were employed. First, 26 weeks of complete news cycle (Sunday through Saturday) were selected at regular intervals of 19 weeks, to represent Typical News Weeks. Second, eight additional weeks were selected, based on the timing of extraordinary events judged to spur increased media coverage of AIDS. These Major AIDS News Event Weeks did prove to have a significantly greater volume of AIDS news coverage than the randomly-selected Typical News Weeks. On average, the designated newspapers and network TV newscasts generated approximately 100 news stories focused on HIV/AIDS during a Major Event Week. This compares with approximately 30 AIDS-focused stories during an average Typical News Week. Stories run in Major Event Weeks were generally longer and more prominently featured than those run in Typical News Weeks. As shown in Figure 5, however, the increase in the volume of coverage was generally short-lived. Only in the case of Magic Johnson's 1991 announcement was the number of stories for the week following a Major Event significantly above the baseline of about 30 stories.
(see Figure 5: Effect Of Major News Events On Aids Coverage)
