Media, AIDS, and truth - misleading news reporting about the AIDS epidemic among heterosexuals and the abuse of truth in journalism - Special Section: The Decline of American Journalism

National Review, June 21, 1993 by Michael Fumento

THE Los Angeles Times's media critic, David Shaw, began the second of a recent two-part series on public distrust of the media: "By almost any reasonable measure, the mainstream news media in this country are more responsible and more ethical today than at any time in their history." And yet, he declared a paragraph later, "public confidence in the news media is in steady decline."

He just doesn't get it--that the public doesn't share his glowing appraisal of the media's performance. He also didn't get it three years ago when, in an otherwise generally favorable review of my book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, he noted scornfully that, 'Time and again, [Fumento] suggests the press deliberately misled the public about the likelihood of a heterosexual AIDS epidemic."

For no issue shows so clearly the depths to which the American media have sunk. At the turn of the century, William Randolph Hearst is said to have boasted, "You supply the pictures and I'll supply the war." The modern yellow press has in effect told the government and AIDS activists: You supply the false material, and we'll supply the war on AlDS.

At least since 1986, the government has been misleading the public on the extent of the AIDS epidemic. That was when the federal Centers for Disease Control decided to move all AIDS sufferers of African or Haitian origin into the category of heterosexual AIDS cases. A man from Zaire who had had sex with a dozen other men, shared needles, and had a blood transfusion would, upon diagnosis, automatically be put into the heterosexual category because of his origin.

The result of shifting all these cases into the heterosexual category was a doubling of that category from 2 to 4 per cent of the total. Rather than cry foul, however, our media watchdogs jumped on this statistical artifact to launch their first wave of AIDS terror. Newsweek proclaimed: "The nation's heterosexual, drug-free majority cannot possibly take reassurance from [the fact that homosexuals and drug addicts still account for most cases] for AIDS ... is not 'their' disease but ours." U.S. News & World Report declared: "The disease of them is suddenly the disease of us." Time warned: "The proportion of heterosexual cases ... is increasing at a worrisome rate ... The numbers as yet are small, but AIDS is a growing threat to the heterosexual population." The cover story of the Atlantic was: "Heterosexuals and AIDS: The Second Stage of the Epidemic." Many of these featured covers with white, middie-class-looking men and women. USA Today declared, "Cases Rising Fastest Among Heterosexuals," with the more stately Washington Post asserting, "Data Shows A/DS Risk Widening; Increase in Cases Among Heterosexuals Is Causing Concern."

Indeed, there is nothing that the media can't turn into a story on how the AIDS epidemic is exploding into heterosexual ranks at last. In 1988, they jumped on a study of infections on U.S. college campuses as "proof' of the long-awaited heterosexual breakout. Barbara Walters on ABC's 20/20 stated flatly that these were heterosexual infections. Few reporters pointed out that the percentage of infections was half the rate estimated for the U.S. population as a whole, or that of the total of 30 infections found, 28 were in men, even though most of those tested were women. Then, in 1990, Cable News Network informed its viewers, "A new report from CDC indicates that AIDS is on the rise on college campuses."AP ran a similar story. The idea was that the results of this study were an increase from the 1988 study. In fact, this was the 1988 study--it just took a medical journal two years to print an article on it, and it was on this that CNN and AP built their stories. Only with AIDS can an old study be declared an alarming increase over itself.

The teenage AIDS epidemic hit the headlines again last year, when the House subcommittee chaired by Pat Schroeder (D., Colo.) released a report declaring that every day the AIDS epidemic "gains ground and threatens the loss of another generation." The media went crazy, with headlines like "AIDS Runs Wild Among Teenagers." Newsweek devoted a cover to the subject and U.S. News & World Report said "AIDS and HIV infection are rising fastest among teens and collegeage kids." Yet, AIDS cases among adolescents had significantly dropped from the year before. Most teen AIDS cases don't come from sex at all but from exposure to tainted blood products. Nobody in the mainstream media pointed this out. A Nexis search revealed only three articles that did, two written by myself for political magazines and one written by a colleague of mine for an actuarial magazine.

And then there is the exploding increase of AIDS among women--at least, according to the front page of the August 16, 1992, New York Times there is. Accompanying the article was a large chart showing that A/DS cases in women in the last year had increased 37 per cent, along with seven photos of women afflicted with AIDS or HIV, of whom all were white. In fact, AIDS cases among women had increased only 17 per cent the year before, down from 34 per cent the year before that. Despite the photos, whites account for less than a fourth of American female AIDS cases. Were these innocent mistakes?