Locating Gay Men in Canadian News Media's HIV Discourses

Purpose: Empirical studies have demonstrated news media play a significant role in shaping public perceptions and public health policy responses to the HIV/AIDs epidemic. Surprisingly, little research has been conducted on Canadian media’s HIV messaging - a research gap addressed by our qualitative pilot study. For this presentation, we focus on two parallel themes emerging within HIV/AIDS discourses: the crisis over security threats to the national blood supply and the place of gay men in Canadian civic society. Our Hypothesis: contradictory thematic trends in news media’s HIV messaging create uneven social/information environments thereby restricting gay men’s (GM) ability to navigate their social-health needs and practices.

Method: This study’s data were drawn from the Globe and Mail's (G&M) Factiva archive. In phase 1, relevant news stories were identified using computerized search terms drawn from the two identified themes. When adjusted for recall/precision bias, “blood scandal” and “blood donation” generated 999 full article stories for the period 1994 to April 2014. The terms “gay” and “rights” generated 466 full article stories respectively for the period 1990 to December 2000. In phase 2, to capture the complexity of discourse production and to consider the possible social and health effects of these discursive practices researchers analysed sub-sample data using discourse analysis. Framing devices were identified – ideas or storylines that produce social meaning, together with underlying ideologies and normative concepts.

 

Results: Our analysis revealed a complex interplay between the two themes: In the one instance, public health messaging relied upon the language of security and risk management in an attempt to shore up the integrity of what was deemed a vulnerable, respectable Canadian public. In the other instance, gay men’s claims to the rights of liberal citizenship were mobilized under the guise of an individually responsivised, non-promiscuous gay sociality. Both discourses exclude. A risk management public health discourse works to justify a continued ban on gay blood donation by recalling gay male sexuality as an ultimate threat to the boundaries of proper heterosexual subjects. At the same time, in stories related to gay men’s right to social inclusion, the trope of monogamous coupledom ironically excludes by decoupling gay male subjectivity/sexuality from the materiality of HIV/AIDS.  Moreover, media discourses bracket off from public consideration current domestic socio-cultural, political and economic realities that under-gird continued high levels of HIV prevalence and incidence among GM.

Implications:   Vulnerable and at risk gay men are rhetorically displaced from making claims as legitimate subjects of the state and as subjects worthy of humanitarian address. This discursive sidelining might very well have public consequences by circumscribing policy decisions allocating resources for prevention technologies; under these discursive regimes policies may fail to address the social structural needs of vulnerable GM, skew perceptions of HIV risk and health effects, and alter how health responsibilities are negotiated and understood. For AIDS service organizations and gay community institutions to be effective in addressing messaging gaps and contradictions, more research is required to test these findings with other media sources, including local mainstream and gay news media.