The Cycle Again, But With A Difference
Hope and despair. Those are the conflicting emotions evoked by two stories tonight.
CBS, September 18, 1986
Anchor Dan Rather's lead-in to two stories, one about the drug AZT and the other about the epidemic in Africa, shows how the AIDS attention cycle replayed itself with a difference. Already, in the fall of 1985, there had been a spate of epidemic-of-fear stories, but by the beginning of 1986, the topic-driven coverage provoked by Rock Hudson's illness had once again been replaced by a largely event-driven routine approach. And once again, news organizations relied on political officials and authoritative medical and scientific sources to indicate when an AIDS story was newsworthy.
But five linked characteristics distinguished the post-Hudson coverage. First, although the number of stories declined from the 1985 level, they were presented earlier in the news flow, and items were placed among the top stories—a status that had rarely occurred prior to the revelations about Rock Hudson.[68]
Indeed, during 1986, when the number of stories dipped, AIDS was the top story on NBC on June 12 (announcing federal forecasts of 170,000 cases). It was also the top story on ABC on June 23 (reporting the Justice Department's announcement that laws barring discrimination against the handicapped did not extend to HIV-positive individuals—this announcement occurring on the same day that the international AIDS conference was held in Paris). Finally, AIDS was the top story on ABC and NBC on October 29 (quoting a National Academy of Sciences report, which charged that the response to AIDS was "woefully inadequate").
More telling, the networks' complete neglect of AIDS as recently as the month before Hudson flew to Paris would never be repeated. Second, as AIDS became more generally recognized as newsworthy, more approaches were brought to bear; thus, stories in 1986 were covered not only by medical and science correspondents but increasingly by law reporters, political reporters (both foreign and domestic), and regional stringers who sought new angles and spoke to new sources. Third, there was thus less consensus about how best to cover the epidemic. The medicalization of the epidemic was no longer complete. The networks' confusion is best revealed by the contrasting logos placed behind the anchor announcing the story—ABC using two overlapping faces of uncertain gender in 1986 and, beginning in March 1987, the word AIDS against two crumbling male and female symbols; CBS using the medical symbol to replace the "I" in AIDS; and NBC varying the graphic for medical stories (e.g., a hand holding a test tube of blood) or for items emphasizing social ramifications (e.g., a man and a woman silhouetted against the letters AIDS). Fourth, this lack ofconsensus meant that a variety of storylines would be revived—the continuing preoccupation with the safety of the blood supply, or the Rock Hudson angle applied to other famous people with AIDS, such as pro football star Jerry Smith—and would continue to reinvigorate the media's attention to the epidemic on a variety of dimensions.[69]
Rogers, Dearing, and Chang, in "Media Coverage of the Issue of AIDS," identify thirteen "sub-issues" of AIDS, whose individual ebb and flow actually allowed the epidemic to continue to be in the news on a regular basis.
Fifth and most important, the increased prominence of AIDS and the new variety of approaches allowed more authoritative sources to be heard. And now these sources were in disagreement, whereas from late 1983 to mid-1985 they had converged on a storyline that reassuringly noted science doggedly at work to master the epidemic. Although the First International AIDS Conference in Atlanta in 1985 went unnoticed by the networks, its 1986 counterpart in Paris became the first of periodically recurring events that attracted enormous coverage.As the number of cases in Europe and Africa grew, sources outside the United States—at an international conference on AIDS in Africa held in Brussels in November 1985, at the Paris conference in June 1986, and later at the World Health Organization—began providing information. Significantly, these sources, drawing from African data, were more likely than their American counterparts to raise the possibility of an epidemic among heterosexuals. As AIDS gained attention, scientists and physicians who were not directly involved in research or treatment spoke out. These sources, instead of talking primarily about progress and breakthroughs, pointed to the rising number of cases and to what became a lead story on both ABC and NBC—the National Academy of Sciences report of a "woefully inadequate" response. Within the Reagan administration, too, there was disagreement; in addition to confusion in the Justice Department over the reach of antidiscrimination laws to people with AIDS and HIV-positive individuals, the outwardly united front was publicly broken by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who tersely called for massive education of adults and children with the words "We're talking about death because of our reticence. … This silence must end" (ABC, October 22, 1986).
Early in 1986 the networks were still trying to maintain a balance between alarm and reassurance. In February, for example, Dan Rather announced new evidence about "how the AIDS virus works with terrifying speed," and science reporter Susan Spencer used this evidence to add a more upbeat closer: "A major development in basic science does not mean that a cure for AIDS is around the corner. But the virus has given up another secret and scientists have a new weapon in the fight against it" (CBS, February 12, 1986).
But as the sources expanded, even the most reassuring of journalists, such as ABC's George Strait, changed tone. Strait was the first to report about the potential for the drug AZT as an area where "great progress is being made," with footage of AIDS patient John Solomon in what Strait termed "the midst of a remarkable recovery."[70]
ABC, March 13, 1986. Strait was then still searching for the breakthrough, as an interview with Samuel Broder revealed. Strait, with urgency in his voice, asked Dr. Broder, "Is this a breakthrough?" and Broder cautiously responded, "It's not a breakthrough, but it's a dent."
But, along with his colleagues, he too would note "the latest disturbing news about the spread of the disease" from the Paris conference in June.[71]ABC, June 23, 1986. On CBS Dan Rather noted, "Just how shocking and widespread is the disease is the subject of Susan Spencer's report" (June 25, 1986); on NBC anchor Chris Wallace pointed to "the alarming spread announced in Paris" (June 22, 1986).
By the spring of 1987, when governmental sources began suggesting testing for those in high-risk categories (including recipients of blood transfusions), Strait showed clinics with heterosexuals seeking to be tested. Then, segueing from a shot of a New York street scene to one of a man and a woman in a rural field, walking and nuzzling, he added, "For most people, the likelihood is low, but even small-town America is not completely safe." The woman in this story had AIDS. After running a quote from her, in which she wondered how many people might be infected without being aware of it, the report froze the frame, and Strait noted, "Last January, two years after these pictures were taken, Amy Sloan died" (ABC, March 19, 1987).Even with the September 1986 announcement of the dramatic results of AZT, the first effective treatment against AIDS, and with the lead stories allocated to the Food and Drug Administration's approval of AZT in March 1987, the networks balanced only muted reassurance with alarm, either noting the toxicity and uncertain duration of AZT's effect or pointing to areas where AIDS was seemingly out of control. Similar storylines emerged once more. Blaming the victims occurred in curious ways. An otherwise bland ABC report on anonymous tests by the CDC to gauge the spread of HIV shifted its visuals from CDC head-quarters to a back shot of two jeans-clad men holding hands when Mike von Fremd intoned his close: "Those testing positive cannot and will not be told" (January 10,1987).
But the stories now used less file footage of the Castro district and more of New York telephoto street scenes or of heterosexual couples shot from behind as they walked down the streets. Some of the reports emanated from bars frequented by single heterosexuals, who now responded with the same caution about multiple partners that the networks had elicited from gay men in 1983.[72]
For example, ABC, March 11, 1987.
The epidemic-of-fear stories—noting again that "the AIDS virus is spreading rapidly, but even more contagious are the fears of the worried well" (NBC, March 17, 1987)—began to fuel not just reaction against high-risk groups and people with AIDS but also a seemingly growing concern from that general populationitself that it, too, might be infected. The epidemic, as far as the nightly news was concerned, had been heterosexualized.
The increased diversity of newsbeats, journalists, and sources brought to bear on the AIDS epidemic after Rock Hudson's death was responsible for the upward spiral of stories that peaked in the spring of 1987. When President Reagan finally delivered a major address on AIDS on April 1, 1987, before the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, he briefly halted this climb, since there was a hiatus of several days on each network before they reported another AIDS story. But in the process the president also guaranteed that all authoritative sources now agreed about the place of the epidemic on the political agenda.