25 YEARS OF AIDS/HIV

AIDS Showed The Media At Their Best, Worst And Everywhere In Between

Media's Flaws Resulted In Many Untold Stories

Margaret Fischl kept her voice even and civil, but when she got off
the phone with the reporter, she shook her head in furious
exasperation. A box of syringes had been found in a parking lot, the
reporter had told her breathlessly. Did that mean an epidemic of AIDS
would lay waste to Miami in the coming months? And what if kids had
played with syringes? Was an AIDS epidemic coming to South Florida's
kindergartens? Fischl couldn't figure out what was more depressing --
the stupidity of the questions or their salaciousness.

"I always say AIDS brought out the worst in people, and the best in
people, and that was true for the news media as well," says Fischl,
director of the AIDS clinical research unit at the University of
Miami. "It was a real mixture.

"The media came through increasingly with reports about what was
really happening. But it was still splattered -- that's the word I
use, that's the right word -- splattered with that cheap sort of
coverage that was hyping everything, selling newspapers and commercials on TV."

Since it appeared 25 years, AIDS and its parent virus HIV have proved
nearly as confusing and frustrating to the American news media as
they have to virologists and epidemiologists. Centered in a gay
community that had always been largely invisible to reporters,
inextricably intertwined with sexual practices that were mostly
unmentionable, and profoundly politicized from the very start, the
disease operated in a journalistic no-man's-land where most of the
old rules -- on everything from who gets mentioned in obituaries to
use of the word "anal sex" on the front page -- no longer applied.

And once reporters found themselves in unmapped territory, they
frequently drifted into the badlands. "I once gave a speech to an
international conference on AIDS called Five Bad AIDS Stories," says
Jon Cohen, who covers the AIDS beat for Science magazine. "I can
assure you, there are a lot more than five now."

Virtually everyone, from journalists to medical professionals to AIDS
activists, agrees that much of the coverage of the disease has been
intelligent and probing and that it has vastly improved over time.
Perhaps more important, it has enticed the public to pay attention.

Rewriting The Rules

"The news media has always been an important part of the response to
this epidemic," says Jennifer Kates, director of AIDS policy at the
Kaiser Family Foundation, which monitors both news coverage and
public attitudes about the disease. "Most Americans get nearly all
their information about AIDS from the news media."

But the coverage has also tended to lurch in different directions at
different times, chasing stories like teenagers chase fads. It has
sometimes been disfigured by the political impulses of both AIDS
activists and journalists themselves, and even more often by the
attempts of reporters to stuff it into traditional reporting
narratives that don't fit.

Last month, Newsweek did a cover story on AIDS titled AIDS at 25:
America: The New Faces of HIV. The photo on the cover featured a
pregnant white woman -- even though black women are 23 times more
likely to contract the disease than white women.

"The media message continues to be overwhelmingly white, even though
AIDS in America is overwhelmingly a black disease," says Phill
Wilson, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Black AIDS Institute.

No news media practice has been more erroneous, more persistent or
more destructive, AIDS experts say, than the persistent portrayal of
the disease's victims as almost exclusively white.

When the Center for Media and Public Affairs studied broadcast
network television news coverage of AIDS in 1992, it found only 16
percent of people with the disease who appeared on-air were black or
Hispanic, about one-third the percentage in real life. Twelve years
later, a Kaiser Family Foundation study of coverage from 1981 to 2002
by seven major newspapers (including The Miami Herald) and the three
TV networks showed that only 3 percent of all stories about AIDS
focused on minority-group victims.

While reporters were busy painting AIDS in whiteface, the disease was
roaring through the black and Hispanic communities. About 68 percent
of those newly infected with HIV, the virus that triggers AIDS, are
black or Hispanic, and AIDS is now the leading fatal disease for
black men ages 25-44.

Some of those deaths, medical professionals and AIDS activists say,
are on the hands of reporters who encouraged blacks and Hispanics to
think the disease wasn't their problem. Fischl remembers going with
medical colleagues to a black community meeting where they hoped to
set up an educational program about AIDS. Instead, it collapsed in
acrimony. "One of the ministers got up and called my colleague a
white affluent racist," Fischl says. "AIDS had nothing to do with
black people, he said."

Agrees Wilson: "We are where we are today in part because of the
mischaracterization of the disease in the media." The obsession with
white AIDS victims has become all the more bizarre, he says, as news
coverage increasingly focuses on the rapid spread of the disease in
Africa. "The message seems to be, if you really want to find black
people with AIDS, get on an airplane and go to Soweto, instead of
getting on the subway and going to Harlem," Wilson complains.

Hand in hand with the racial distortions in news coverage is the
media's reluctance to confront the real causes of the disease. It's
spread mainly through anal intercourse -- which, in the United
States, is mostly a gay practice. Another important gateway for the
disease is the use of contaminated needles by drug addicts. But that
might be hard to tell from the news coverage.

The 1992 Center for Media and Public Affairs study found only 2
percent of the AIDS patients on TV news were drug abusers, barely a
tenth of the real percentage. And the comprehensive Kaiser study
found that since 1996, less than 5 percent of stories about AIDS
focused on gay men.

Instead, news coverage has spiked whenever a sympathetic heterosexual
with the disease can be found. No story about AIDS has ever captured
the new media's imagination like that of basketball star Magic
Johnson, who says he was infected with HIV through sex with women.
The Kaiser study showed that Johnson was the subject of nearly one of
every five stories about AIDS in 1992, the year after he revealed his
infection.

Similar, though smaller, spikes occurred with coverage of tennis star
Arthur Ashe, who got the disease from a blood transfusion; Ryan
White, an Indiana teenager whose hemophilia led to an HIV-tainted
transfusion; Desoto County's Ray family, burned out of their trailer
home when they tried to enroll three hemophiliac children with AIDS
in local schools; and Kimberly Bergalis, the young Fort Pierce woman
who was apparently infected by her dentist.

In between cuddly, nonthreatening victims, much of the news media in
the early days kept up a steady drumbeat of stories predicting that a
tidal wave of AIDS was about to sweep over the heterosexuals. NOW NO
ONE IS SAFE FROM AIDS, blared a 1985 cover of Life magazine.
HETEROSEXUALS AND AIDS: THE SECOND STAGE OF THE EPIDEMIC, warned a
1987 Atlantic Monthly cover story based in large part on interviews
with porn stars. Like a malignant echo chamber, TV and radio shows
amplified and distorted the message further. "One in five
heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three
years," Oprah Winfrey ominously informed her viewers in 1988.

But that tidal wave has never reached shore. Of the nearly one
million cases of AIDS reported in the United States since the
epidemic began, only about 17 percent came through heterosexual
contact. Many of those cases involved the sexual partners of drug
addicts; so-called tertiary infections -- that is, heterosexual to
heterosexual to heterosexual -- remain infrequent.

Like the media's refusal to recognize AIDS victims of any color but
white, journalism's concentration on the least likely modes of the
disease's transmission has had consequences. "It's like there's a
fire at my address and the firetrucks spray water on every house but
mine," says Michael Fumento, author of The Myth of Heterosexual Aids.
"The people who need the help most are getting it the least . . .

"The media have concentrated on the demographics of their readers and
viewers, rather than on the demographics of the people who have have
the disease or are likely to get it."

Hubris Of Science

In a world where the existence of conspiracies is suspected in
everything from the Kennedy assassination to American Idol voting, a
story as big as AIDS was bound to generate its share of diabolical
theories. And the media have bitten on them in a big way, credulously
on the possibility that AIDS was cooked up in a lab. Everyone from
the Los Angeles Times (AIDS COULD BE GERM WAR LAB PRODUCT: M.D.) to
Rolling Stone ("There was a shadow over the conquest of polio") has
at least dipped a toe in the conspiracy pool.

The oldest and most persistent theories might collectively be labeled
The Hubris of Science. They posit that AIDS is not an act of nature
but of man -- the result of a vaccine gone wrong. It certainly makes
for livelier stories than the scientific consensus: that the AIDS
virus crossed from African chimpanzees into local tribesmen who ate their meat.

The leading suspect in European papers has been smallpox vaccine. In
1987, the Times of London published a 1,200-word story arguing --
based almost entirely on the word of a single unnamed advisor to the
World Health Organization -- that a 1967 smallpox vaccination
campaign in Africa turned the AIDS virus from a dormant biological
bit player into a rampaging epidemic. Picked up by wire services, the
story quickly sprouted all over the world.

In America, the most popular version has the AIDS virus unleashed on
the world in a 1950s polio vaccination campaign in Africa. It first
surfaced in a 1992 cover story in Rolling Stone and eventually
achieved enough intellectual momentum for an entire book, The River:
A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS, by Edward Hooper.

Neither the smallpox nor polio theories ever had much going for them
beyond circumstantial evidence -- clusters of AIDS cases in the same
regions where they were carried out -- and they've both been laid to
rest (scientifically, at least) by tests that unraveled the genetic
code of the AIDS virus and established it dates back to around 1931.
But they continue to reverberate in the Third World, where local
populations have resisted polio vaccination for fear that it's a
Trojan horse for AIDS.

"People like explanations that they can easily grasp," says
Northwestern University AIDS researcher Steve Wolinsky. "It's much
easier to grasp the idea that the virus was the result of human
intervention than the idea that this complicated confluence of events
in Africa -- new roads and railways, agricultural practices,
movements of peoples, the emergence of prostitution, the mixing of
cultures -- put people into proximity with these infected animals.

"Not only is the conspiracy theory easier to grasp, it's easier for
journalists to tell. Explaining Darwinian evolution to people whose
eyes glaze over to begin with, and don't believe it anyway in the
end, is very difficult."

Premature Burial

"Hope is a great news story," observes Science's Cohen. ' Hope Up!'
'Hope Down!' That's one of the great things about journalism -- hope
always changes. With AIDS coverage, you could do a hope meter, with a
needle moving from high to low."

In the early days of AIDS, the needle was almost always down, often
puzzlingly so. Consider two 1988 headlines from USA Today: HIGH AIDS
LEVEL FOUND ON CAMPUS. (Actual numbers: The infection rate at
colleges was actually only one-half to one-third that of America as a
whole.) Or, BY 1991, ONE IN TEN BABIES MAY BE AIDS VICTIMS. (Actual
numbers: Less than 2,000, total.)

But in 1996, with the advent of new drug treatments that prevented
the virus from developing into the full-blown disease in many
patients, the needle flipped violently in the other direction.

The author of WHEN PLAGUES END, a cover story in The New York Times
Sunday magazine on Nov. 10, 1996, wrote of how he celebrated a news
conference on the new drugs by "wandering aimlessly into a bar, where
late-evening men in suits gazed up at muscle-boy videos, their tired
faces and occasional cruising glances a weirdly comforting return to
normalcy." A couple of weeks later, a Newsweek cover story titled THE
END OF AIDS? suggested that with the disease gone, it will be back to
business as usual. "Huge swaths of the American psyche in the age of
AIDS -- how we view sex, trust, responsibility -- will have to
change," the story proclaimed.

Those stories must seem like a macabre joke to the nearly 300,000
Americans who have developed AIDS since they appeared. "What is that
quote -- 'The news of my demise is greatly exaggerated'?" dryly
wonders Wolinsky. "You have to keep everything in perspective, in
proportion. At the time, all of a sudden, we had antiviral drugs that
were actually making a difference. It was like Lazarus rising from
the dead -- all these people got up and walked out of the hospital.
But the idea that everyone would respond to the drugs has not been borne out."