The Position of 1992 in HIV and AIDS Reporting: Focusing on the Period of Rapid Growth in News Headlines

Abstract

Media coverage of HIV and AIDS in Japan began in the 1980s and was later boosted by the “AIDS panic” of 1987 and the settlement of the court case on drug-induced AIDS in 1996. However, if we check the number of newspaper articles related to HIV and AIDS, we can confirm that in addition to the above events, there was a large increase in the number of reports in 1992. However, there were no notable events related to HIV and AIDS in 1992.

In this paper, we analyzed the headlines of news reports in and around 1992 using KH Coder, and tried to clarify what topics were mainly reported in this period. First, for the data of the first half of the 1990s, each year was set as an external variable, and the topics characteristic of each year were clarified by correspondence analysis and co-occurrence network analysis. Next, we conducted a co-occurrence network analysis on the data of 1992 only, and tried to summarize the words with strong connections as topics. Finally, we checked the results of the analysis against the literature describing the year 1992, and confirmed the differences with the results of the KH Coder analysis.