Framing of HIV/AIDS and Social Marketing Programme: A Comparative Analysis of Malaysian Mainstream Newspapers in the Year 2006 and 2011

Abstract

Inexpensiveness and accessibility of the newspaper have become the decisive factors for health practitioners and departments to impart information on health issues to the general population. The advancement of science and technology permeating every nook and cranny of our society has arisen our awareness in keeping up with the role of the health sector especially in tackling epidemics. In the interest of alerting the public on the epidemic and its prevention, media practitioners “make up” the related news in a different way in order to make it salient among the public. The principle objective of this paper was interested in framing analysis on HIV/AIDS epidemic in the three selected Malaysian mainstream newspapers namely Utusan Malaysia, The Star and Sin Chew Daily. This study also seeks to find out at which level our AIDS reporting can be described. Furthermore, this bulk of paper also identifies the dominant social marketing programme that has been covered by all three newspapers in the study period