Media Coverage of AIDS: Broad-Based, Consistent Over Past Decade

subsequent years, however, celebrities emerged as the leading principal news maker. In
1995, the last full year of the study, celebrities outscored the scientific and medical
community by 25% to 14% as the top news maker.
AIDS coverage has shifted toward the "softer" news sections, such as sports and lifestyle.
Prior to 1991, AIDS coverage was virtually nonexistent in sports sections of newspapers
and newscasts. But in three of the five years from 1992-95, sports accounted for 15% or
more of all AIDS-focused stories. Since the late 1980s, the lifestyle section's share of
AIDS coverage has also about doubled. Coverage in both was no doubt driven by the
increased focus on celebrities as news makers around AIDS issues.
AIDS has been incorporated into the regular news agenda. In 1987, two-thirds (69%) of
all news stories with any mention of AIDS had AIDS as their primary focus, while onethird (31%) made only a passing reference to the disease. By 1994, these figures reversed
themselves (30% primary focus vs. 70% not primary focus) as AIDS was more often
treated as one of several national problems along with crime, substance abuse,
homelessness, etc.
The length of the average AIDS news story has decreased. In three of the first four years
studied (1985-88), over a quarter of all. AIDS-focused newspaper stories run during a
typical week were 700 words or more. In subsequent years, longer articles accounted for
such a large a share of AIDS newspaper stories only once (1993=26%).
Trends in Media Coverage of AIDS and the Public's Knowledge and Attitudes Toward
the Disease and Epidemic. Though surveys often find that Americans are ill-informed about
most national issues, they are generally knowledgeable about AIDS prevention and treatment,
which have been major focuses of media coverage over the past 10 years. According to the
Kaiser Family Foundation's survey of Americans on AIDS, most Americans know that AIDS
can be transmitted through sexual intercourse (97%), that a pregnant woman with AIDS can
pass the virus to her baby (94%), that no vaccine is currently available to protect a person from
getting AIDS (88%), and that drugs are available that can lengthen the life of a person infected
with AIDS (75%).
One notable gap in the public's knowledge, however, is a misperception among most
Americans (51%) that the proportion of AIDS cases that occur inside the U.S. relative to the
rest of the world is greater than it really is. This may be due in part to the lack of international
AIDS stories in the U.S. media, which largely focuses on the epidemic from a domestic
perspective.
Americans say they rely heavily upon the news media for information on AIDS, with television
(67%), newspapers (54%) and magazines (50%) being cited as the top three major sources for
the public of AIDS information.