Experts in Crisis: The Framing of Radio Debate about the Risk of AIDS to Heterosexuals

Abstract

Analysis of media representations of AIDS needs to examine the narrative construction of `otherness' and `expertise'. This paper is part of a project examining the narrative representation of the `new expertise' in Australia in a variety of popular media forms after the 1983 pessimism of the `Grim Reaper' television campaign. It examines the radio debate around Michael Fumento's The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS in terms of the empiricist and culturalist discourses of the main protagonists (Professor John Dwyer and Fumento), and their positioning and framing by radio interviews. The paper examines the way in which interviewers' procedures to display neutrality interact with intertextual authenticating devices to position each protagonist as `expert' when interviewed singly, though the consistent recycling of authenticating pre-texts in the Dwyer interviews gave him greater definitional scope. The paper concludes with an analysis of the semantic and rhetorical strategies employed by Fumento and Dwyer when on-line together, and an account of Dwyer's positioning of the audience in his construction of scientific consensus.

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