Patents, pills, the press and the poor : discourse and hegemony in news coverage of the global 'access to medicines' dispute, 1997-2003 : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communication and Journalism at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealan
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Date
2012
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Massey University
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Abstract
In the mid‐1990s a transnational civil society campaign emerged to
advocate greater essential medicines access for the majority world.
The campaign mobilised on a variety of fronts, but in particular
around the argument that intellectual property protection was the
central impediment to equitable medicines access. The campaign
argued that strong patent protection created artificially high medicine
prices, and that, in the case of global HIV/AIDS, such prices prohibited
medicines access for the vast majority of those in need of it. The
major pharmaceutical companies disagreed, arguing instead that
absolute patent protection was essential for new medicine
development. When a coalition of pharmaceutical companies sued
the South African government over generic medicines access in 1998,
the dispute became crystalised into a dramatic mediatised conflict.
This thesis examines press coverage of the medicines access dispute
in key United States, British and South African news outlets over the
years 1997 to 2003. Adopting Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory
as a macro‐theoretical guide, the thesis conceptualises the media
space as a field of contestation between opposed political projects
seeking to hegemonically articulate their particular discourse. Prior
commentary on the medicines access dispute has suggested media
coverage was a key driver in publicising the civil society campaign’s
message. This thesis contributes previously missing empirical data to
such claims, addressing the questions: did the news media discourse
on HIV/AIDS medicines transform to better reflect the civil society
campaign’s arguments over those of the major pharmaceutical
companies? If so, what were the principal factors influencing this
transformation?
Through corpus‐assisted discourse analysis of a sample of a 1,113
newspaper articles, and consideration of personal testimonies from
key journalists and activists, the thesis argues the media discourse
did indeed transform in favour of the civil society campaign.
However, while the campaign was successful in promoting a patentbased
definition of the crisis, the solution most widely adopted was
one that increased aid funding and decreased medicines prices, but
which left the intellectual property infrastructure largely intact. In
this way, the thesis documents both the successful articulation of a
counter‐hegemonic discourse within the news media, as well as the
process by which this challenge was reabsorbed into pre‐existing
power structures.
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Keywords
Drug accessibility, AIDS drugs, South Africa, Intellectual property, Pharmaceutical industry, News media, Discourse theory, Political communication, Counter-hegemony