It was only nineteen years ago when the world was first introduced to the AIDS virus, but by 1983 a significant number of people had died from the dreaded disease and media coverage began. AIDS was almost immediately viewed as one of the most stimulating scientific puzzles of the century. On June 5, 1981, the Federal Centers of Disease Control reported five cases of a rare pneumonia among gay men. It is the manner in which this epidemic has been reported that is my main focus. In the case of AIDS, the popular media, especially the news media, have played an extremely important role in drawing upon pre-established knowledge and belief systems to create this new disease as a meaningful phenomenon, particularly in regions dominated by the mass media such as westernized countries (Lupton, 4). It is more than the way this disease has been reported, it is the way in which the news accounts of AIDS have been constructed and have changed over the decade, and specifically the way in which AIDS has been known (Lupton, 4). The earliest representations of AIDS as a plague or as a gay plague suggested that aids was being made to carry a heavy burden of meanings and connotations quite extraneous to the virus itself and more to do with unresolved fears about sexuality and social order (Eldridge, 213). The first reports of this disease were in medical journals and werent seen until 1981, although the symptoms associated with this disease had been noted in gay patients as early as 1979. The mainstream press was very uninterested in getting involved. The first expert appeared on Good Morning America for forty-five seconds to respond to an article that was printed in the December 1981 issue of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. In the first six months only five stories about this new epidemic appeared in the national press. In these early times the disease had been named GRID Gay Related Immune Deficiency by the Center for Di...
