Pubdate: Sun, 11 Jun 2006
Source: Miami Herald (FL)
Copyright: 2006 The Miami Herald
Contact:  http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/262
Author: Glenn Garvin Ana Lense-Larrauri, Monika Leal And Megan 
Walters, Miami Herald Staff
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/women.htm (Women)

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."
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman