television and health communication: the representation of AIDS in medical dramas

AIDS is one of the most important problems in health area which human efforts to find an effective treatment for it has not yet come to a fruition. The increase in the number of HIV positive patients across the world, , justifies the attention paid to this disease and its representation in mass media. Disease portrayal has been found to be associated with attitudes towards specific diseases, feelings about the person with the disease, as well as what needs to be done about the disease. Therefore, three medical dramas including “the shadow of loneliness”, “casualty” and “all saints” in the research were analyzed to know how HIV/AIDS is represented in mass media. Semiology and discourse analysis were used as methodology and twelve scenes were analyzed in general. “Scene” is the unit of analysis in this research. The findings suggest that in each of these TV series the emphasis is upon a certain way of infection and other disease dimensions including disease development course, prevention, treatment and in general biomedical dimension are ignored. Whereas, the ethical and religious dimension of prevention, with emphasis on ethics, social support, especially family support and encouragement in fighting the disease are under stressed.