Misreporting the AIDS Story

"Aiding AIDS: The Story of a Media Virus" by David R. Boldt, in Forbes MediaCritic (Fall 1996), P.O. Box 762, Bedminster, N.J. 07921. (Forbes MediaCritic has since ceased publication.)

In a Wall Street Journal exposé last year, reporters Amanda Bennett and Anita Sharpe revealed that at a 1987 meeting, officials of the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) decided to exaggerate the risks to heterosexuals of contracting the AIDS virus. That, they believed, was the only way to drum up widespread support for measures to combat the disease, which mainly strikes homosexual men and intravenous-drug users and their sexual partners. "If I can get AIDS, anyone can" was the theme of the public service ad campaign the agency launched later that year. The front-page Journal article was "an exemplary piece of journalism," says Boldt, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, but it skipped over an important part of the story: "the news media’s deep complicity in aiding and abetting the heterosexual AIDS scare."

When, for example, the CDC issued a press release indicating that the number of heterosexuals with AIDS had doubled, the news media, for the most part, failed to explain that the increase was mostly due to a change in CDC bookkeeping. A February 1987 Atlantic Monthly story by Katie Leishman, "Heterosexuals and AIDS: The Second Stage of the Epidemic," Boldt says, "made virtually no attempt to back up its alarmist contentions." News stories disproportionately featured individuals from low-risk groups as AIDS victims. A 1987 study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that heterosexuals were eight times more likely to appear as AIDS victims in TV news reports than they were to contract the disease.

Over the years, Boldt points out, a few journalists, such as the Chicago Tribune’s John Crewdson and the Inquirer’s Donald Drake, read the "fine print" in the CDC reports and pointed out that the threat to heterosexuals was exaggerated. For their labors, they were roundly criticized, not only by AIDS activists but often by people inside their own newsrooms.

Journalists played up the threat to heterosexuals for various reasons, Boldt says. Some were just ignorant or credulous. Others may have realized that it improved the chances of a page-one by-line. Others may have feared criticism if they bucked the trend.

Free-lance writer Michael Fumento was relentlessly attacked for his Myth of Heterosexual AIDS (1990), Boldt notes. Gay activists and public health officials called him and his book "irresponsible," "meanspirited," "myopic," "homophobic," and "sexist." AIDS activists, according to Fumento, mounted a nationwide campaign to keep his book out of bookstores, and to a considerable extent, succeeded. Ironically, Boldt says, Fumento’s book is praised in some recent books by gay authors who have come to realize that "the anybody-can-get-it strategy" dilutes the efforts made for homosexuals.

Did the Wall Street Journal exposé finally put an end to the myth of heterosexual AIDS? "Probably not," Boldt says. "Reporters long familiar with the story say that too many people now have too much invested in keeping the myth alive."