"Tidningar är som tveeggade svärd"
En jämförelse hur den indiska tidningen The Hindu skrev om ämnet hiv/aids och hiv-positiva personer under 16 dagar år 2005 och 16 dagar år 2007.
We wanted to know how the subject HIV/AIDS was handled in the Indian newspaper The Hindu, which is written in English, during a period of 16 days (30 October-14 November) in 2005 compared to the corresponding period during 2007. Because we liked to study what kind of differences there were in the reporting between these two years. In addition we also wanted to learn how people living with HIV and AIDS are represented in pictures and text. To find out this was the purpose with this investigation.The study is made from the theory of stigma, semiotics and from a professional model of the normative theory. The articles about HIV/AIDS were quantitatively analyzed with help of a schedule of codes and we performed a qualitative analysis on several articles, four from 2005 and four from 2007. We also did four research interviews based on how people infected with HIV thought about journalists? reporting in general and also one specific article that was written about HIV/AIDS.A journalist at The Hindu was interviewed so that we could learn more about how the editorial staff on a newspaper work and what they should have in mind when they write about the subject. He told us that the newspaper didn?t have any written guidelines to follow when they made an article about HIV/AIDS.The result of our study was that The Hindu wrote more about HIV/AIDS 2007 compared to 2005 and the articles were larger and had more pictures. In the qualitative text analysis we found out that the articles from 2005 often were about the disease, while the articles from 2007 were more about the HIV-positives and the problems they sometimes face with discrimination and stigmatisation. 2005 journalists used doctors and experts as sources, two years later the journalists talked more with ordinary people. These results are similar to earlier research in the same subject. We could also see that children living with HIV/AIDS now could be found in the articles, they were the ones who got least space in the media before.Even though the media are starting to talk more with people living with HIV/AIDS, we found out during our research interviews with PLWHA in India that it may be hard to get someone to openly talk about the subject, because it?s taboo. And one man we interviewed said he would commit suicide if a journalist revealed his status. The PLWHA are less stereotyped in the paper nowadays, but the fear and the discrimination in the society still seem to be there.