An Empirical Study Of The Media Construction About The Issue Of AIDS

As the main channel for the Public to access to AIDS information, the Mass Media has played an important role in the spread of AIDS News, and also has important effect on the formation and change of the public attitude about AIDS. This study focuses on the five main issues. Firstly, the paper presents the status of the media construction of AIDS issue by the date collected from the media coverage, then, based on these date, to analyses the construction methods of the attribute agenda-setting of the issue of the AIDS in the Media. The study found that, there is no direct correspondence between the media coverage and the real-world indicator of the issue of AIDS. And Among those different newspapers, despite the release area, attributes and levels vary, the theme of the report, the report type, the message sources, the report layout and tone of the report, the media coverage did not show significant differences, the media agenda on the issue of AIDS is very similar.In order to discover the effect of media construction of AIDS issue, the researcher have study the relationship between the media agenda, public agenda and policy agenda on the perspective of the agenda-setting process. The results showed that the policy agenda is the driving force behind the process of agenda setting, and has a direct and significant impact on the media agenda. On the issue of AIDS, the policy agenda directly affect the step change in media coverage of AIDS, and also greatly affect the public agenda. As the result of the study, the media agenda has been more negative in China than in the west society, and has been influenced deeply by policy agenda, most of the construction on the issue of the DIAS is the passive response to the policy agenda. The public agenda, the target of the impact of the media agenda and policy agenda, has not been taken seriously, and has very little impact on the other two agendas.Generally considered that the media coverage on AIDS issue has entered the more scientific and human stage after2003, but there are still some problems, such as the uneven distribution report subject, just focused on fewer genres, the report time focused on the world AIDS Day, and the media agenda is passive in the agenda-setting process on the issue of AIDS issues, there also are some negative impact on the public affected by the media coverage. Because the media is under a particular social environment, there are many external and internal factors to influence the media coverage. The external factors come from the he policy, economy, culture, the internal include the organizational goals, mutual influence between media organizations, news production framework and individual correspondents literacy etc. Existence of these problems with the media construction in AIDS issue, the function of the media that has played in the solved of the AIDS problems is not match with it should be. The root of the cause is that the media agenda depend on policy agenda too much. Finally, in order to improve the leading role of the media agenda in the construction of the AIDS issue and the function in the agenda-setting process, some proposes have been advanced, including the correspondents’literacy training, paying more attention to needs of the public agenda, and so on.