| News making is a patterned and socially constructed system for the production of knowledge, which fits within the existing power structures of society. This research examines the ideological functions of the news media's "classifying out the world" (Hall, 1978) and "definitional control" (Schiller, 2000) by exploring the news framing process, in which some occurrences are selected, given meaning, and made more salient in systematic ways. This study analyzes U.S. newspapers' framing of the AIDS situation in Africa, in relation to international regulations on drug patents and widespread imbalances in global information flows. This work critiques how the intellectual property system largely excludes formerly colonized countries from the benefits of scientific innovations, such as AIDS therapies, as a result of a postcolonial informational hierarchy. This research defines public health, specifically with regard to AIDS in Africa---the site of more than two-thirds of the world's HIV-infected people---as a social and historical construct bounded by postcolonial globalization. By combining the concept of "hegemony" with Bourdieu's theories of "habitus" and "symbolic power," this work examines how the biomedical aspect of AIDS has been related to the global information regulatory system, through drug patents, and how the AIDS-drug patent issue has been constructed through news discourse. It critiques the ways in which such mainstream U.S. news reporting depicts these complex issues and compares this reporting with alternative media's treatment of those issues in the U.S. context. |
