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The politics of reception: Audience decoding of HIV/AIDS coverage in the media
Abstract
As the first handful of cases of what was to become known as AIDS were identified, social meanings were attached to a "meaningless" biological phenomenon. As the scope of the epidemic widened, these and other new meanings emerged in a wide range of social areas, where they have had immediate and tangible impact on policy, treatment, and the lives of those who have been infected with HIV or diagnosed with AIDS. Informed by British cultural studies, feminist theory and gay and lesbian theory, and focusing specifically on the reception of media coverage of HIV/AIDS, this dissertation explores some of the practices through which privileged discourses achieved domination and others were subordinated and marginalized. Using a series of group interviews, this project looks at decodings of three network news reports about HIV/AIDS which were generated by members of two specific audiences: educated, white, middle-class heterosexual adults who the producers of network news report having in mind as the audience for the evening news, and gay men and lesbians--likewise educated, white and middle-class--a population which has been instrumental in resisting dominant constructions of the epidemic. The results confirm previous observations that the weak narrative structure of news reports contributes to disengaged viewers and difficulties in comprehension. Viewers tend to seize on moments of ideological resonance in the report: those items in the report which fit into the viewers' ideological framework help structure the interpretation which is generated. Additionally, the analysis raises issues of alienation and relevance: heterosexual participants don't consider themselves at risk for HIV infection, and can't relate to the world shown in these reports, while gay men and lesbians assume network coverage to be largely irrelevant as a source of information about HIV/AIDS and are alienated both by the discourses it includes and the absence of those which it does not. Finally, while viewers in each of the groups construct similar meanings around the reports, there are some broad differences in the discourses in which these meanings are interpreted. The ability to create an oppositional decoding depends on access to alternative or oppositional discourses which few of the participants seemed to have.
Subject Area
Mass communications|Journalism
Recommended Citation
Preston, Elizabeth Hall, "The politics of reception: Audience decoding of HIV/AIDS coverage in the media" (1993). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9316706.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9316706