ABSTRACT
The interaction between the news media and the social institutions they report is a key issue for the sociology of journalism (Schlesinger 1989a: 283). What appears in the news is the outcome of a process of negotiation between the reporter and the source of information. In the ‘dance’ between reporters and official sources some see the officials as leading (for example, Cohen 1963; Hall et al. 1978), while others argue that reporters do (for example, Hess 1984). However this dance is subject to a number of agendas, personal, organizational and political, that are brought to bear on the reporter and the source within their own organization.1 Although we are aware of the factors that shape the behaviour of the reporter within his or her organization, we are less aware of the factors that determine source behaviour. What we do know about the latter is often based on accounts provided by those in the media and hence these are coloured by their perceptions of source’s activity.2 In our work on HIV/AIDS we have started to examine how such agendas have shaped media-source interaction from the point of view of the source as well as the reporter.
