The end of AIDS?: AIDS reporting in the Australian press in the mid-1990s

In news reports of HIV/AIDS, the discourses giving meaning to the pandemic have constantly shifted and changed since its emergence in the early 1980s. This article presents an analysis of HIV/AIDS reporting in the Australian press in the three-year period between 1994 and 1996. It focuses on two dominant topical themes appearing in this period: politics and policy debates around HIV/AIDS and medico-scientific research and treatment issues. It is argued that in the mid-1990s HIV/AIDS has increasingly become portrayed as a biomedical rather than a public health problem, and again as affecting gay men rather than the general population. It is suggested that these changes in representation may eventually lead to ‘the end of AIDS’ as a highly prominent phenomenon in the news media, with implications for general attitudes towards the syndrome and future policy and funding decisions.