Patents, Pills, and the Press ― The Rise and Fall of the Global HIV/AIDS Medicines Crisis in the News

This volume considers how the global crisis of HIV/AIDS medicines access and patent protection was portrayed in mainstream international news media from the mid-1990s on, focusing on the era of 1999-2001 and how news coverage represented the discourses of different special interest groups and the effects on the HIV/AIDS medicines access crisis. It analyzes news content, the perspectives of journalists and civil society communicators, and the broader political and economic processes involved to outline the phases and key events in the mediatization of this crisis. It describes the introduction of the connection between patent protection and HIV/AIDS medicines access in mainstream news coverage in 1999; how the lawsuit between pharmaceutical companies and the South African government in 2001 provided a way to present wider coverage of the medicines access crisis, as well as what occurred between the competing civil society campaign “patent” definition and the major pharmaceutical company “poverty” definition of the crisis; competing global and nation-centric definitions; subsequent changes in media coverage as patent protections increased; the media relations strategy of the “Access to Medicines” campaign; and the decline of coverage up to 2013. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Thomas Owen (PhD, Massey University) is Lecturer in Communication Studies at Auckland University of Technology. He is a recipient of the Loxley Award for peace research, and a Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellow. His work has appeared in The International Journal of Press/Politics, Critical Discourse Studies, and The International Journal of Communication.