Inevitably, public understanding of AIDS has become constructed around images, symbols and texts provided by the mass media. Mass communications theory can help us understand the underlying dynamics of that construction. What Lippman was speaking to here was the place of the mass media in constructing the public mind. I am not suggesting that the mass media are the only or even primary influence in the establishment of public understanding. However, we can recognize a real potency in the mass media in those realms of which, by definition and circumstance, the lay public can know little.
Science is clearly one such realm.
This thesis proceeds by examining the coverage of AIDS by The New York Times and the London Sunday Times . The method employed interpretive textual analysis, supplemented by a series of interviews with journalists who have followed the AIDS story and with medical professionals involved with the AIDS story.