Doctoral dissertation, Goteborgs Universitet.

Includes bibliographical references.

A doctoral student examined the news coverage of two African and two European prestigious daily newspapers to compare the attention and ima ge the media dedicated to AIDS news during 1983-1990. The European dail ies were Dagens Nyheter (Sweden) and The Times (UK), while the African dailies were Daily Nation (Kenya) and The New Vision (Uganda). The stud ent examined the prevalence of AIDS in the four countries as reported b y the World Health Organization and/or the official statistics and then compared it with the amount of AIDS coverage in the newspapers. When e xamining the amount of space and frequency of coverage, the European ne wspapers accorded more coverage to AIDS than did the African newspapers . Yet the Ugandan newspaper had allotted much more news space on the fr ont page for AIDS news than the other newspapers (40% vs. 6-11%). Betwe en 1983 and 1987 AIDS news coverage increased steadily, followed by a d ecrease thereafter. The leading angle in the stories on AIDS was protec tion. The risk prevention/protection activities covered in the stories included information campaign, public education, counseling/therapy, sc reening, condom usage, isolation, registering, and new laws. Risk messa ges peaked in 1987. The arena for more than 50% of the news space on AI DS was the newspaper's own country in the case of all the newspapers ex cept the Kenyan newspaper, in which 60% of the news space on AIDS was d edicated to countries other than Kenya. The objects of AIDS news usuall y were HIV-positive/AIDS-affected individuals and the subjects usually were HIV/AIDS specialists or government officials. The image of the sto ries tended to be neutral. The student believed that newspapers have a large role to play in AIDS risk communication