AIDS and Heterosexuals in the Australian

Study Overview

The study entitled From complacency to panic: AIDS and heterosexuals in the Australian press, July 1986 to June 1988 (Lupton, 1992) reports on the preliminary findings from a content analysis of AIDS news coverage in Australian press from June 1986 to July 1988. When revealing the preliminary varying ideologies in press, Lupton stresses the importance of evaluating how the popular media selects and presents news according to societal interests. Lupton (1992) seeks to point out the common situation in Australia that most people lies on information reported by the media rather than by health professionals. She continues to use this study to illustrate if media reporting has a significant impact on shaping public attitudes and behaviour. Her study expresses a concern that the popular press has increasingly resorted to publishing false and sensational stories related to human health without factual evidence that often results in provoking panic within audiences. In order to create AIDS into a media sensation for the audiences, newspapers have long inclined to entertain and misinform readers by putting its blame on promiscuous heterosexuals, homosexual men, and intravenous drug users. The view of Lupton (1992) is in accord with this idea and she further seeks to explore if it applies to the Australian press in this study.

The study undertakes a content analysis with all articles mentioning AIDS in Australian newspapers published between 1986 and 1988. The research demonstrates that the press generally helps the amplification to reporting AIDS as a spread to heterosexual population by supporting the first public health information campaign called the ‘Grim Reaper’ campaign (Ibid). The ‘Grim Reaper’ campaign used horrible...

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...er concern towards heterosexuals in press reporting and failure of increased level of hostile treatment are worth being applied to Lupton’s study in particular (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994).

Bibliography

Hansen, A., Cottle, S, Negrine, R., Newbold, C. (1998) Mass Communication Research Methods. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press Ltd

Goode, Erich and Nachman Ben-Yehuda (1994) Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Lupton, D. (1992) From complacenct to panic: AIDS and heterosexuals in the Australian press, July 1986 to June 1988 in Helath Education Research Theory and Practice. 7(1): pp9-20.

Lupton, D. (1994) Moral Threats and Dangerous Desires: AIDS in the News Media. New York: Taylor & Francis Ltd.

Summer, C. (1979) Reading ideologies: an investigation into the Marxist theory of ideology and law. London: Academic Press.