Behind the Times (35 page)

There is still a leap from “gut feeling” to “phobia.” Journalist James
Kinsella investigated the Rosenthal years at the
Times
in his study
Covering the Plague: AIDS
and the American Media.
Rosenthal’s fractious personality and his imperious newsroom behavior engaged Kinsella principally as they affected his larger interest, how the
Times
—in his words, “the agenda setter for major national news”—and other news organizations covered the rise and spread of acquired immune deficiency syndrome in the 1980s. Kinsella argued the general thesis that AIDS went uncovered in the early years first and foremost because mainstream journalists didn’t know any of its victims. In Kinsella’s view, journalism actively pursued the story only when personal connections were made—specifically, when “people like us” succumbed to AIDS. Thus the death of Rock Hudson in October 1985, at the age of fifty-nine, put AIDS on the front pages. A popular, well-known actor, someone “like us,” Hudson was actually a closet homosexual. Now that was news! Implicit, too, in Kinsella’s argument was the notion that mainstream journalism initially regarded the deaths of homosexual men and IV-drug abusers as not worth reporting in detail.

The argument was flawed. Mainstream journalism’s indifference to
the first AIDS deaths reflected not the victims’ marginality but their ordinariness. In America, and in the
Times
, all men do not die equal. Contemporary journalism celebrates celebrity; the AIDS cases, pre-Rock Hudson, failed the media test of social status. The early narrative also lacked the hot-button elements that make events involving the uncelebrated newsworthy. When the modes of virus transmission were more clearly understood, editors had the sensational charge the AIDS story needed (though they were often too tongue-tied to speak up, as the record will show). Logically, too, Kinsella was on uncertain ground. If New York City in the 1980s had, by Kinsella’s own (wildly improbable) estimate, a population of 600,000 to 1 million homosexuals, then it’s hard to accept that no one at the
Times
knew anyone with AIDS or was likely to be at risk himself. Even if New York’s homosexual population was half or a third Kinsella’s estimate, it was still unlikely that no one at the
Times
would know what was going on in the city.

Nevertheless, Kinsella raised valid questions. If the
Times’
staff wasn’t ignorant of what certainly was going on outside its doors—and just as certainly, inside—why the failure to give the AIDS story the attention it deserved? Several factors inhibited every news organization’s coverage, starting with the federal government’s initially slow response to AIDS, and the significant areas of medical ignorance about the origins of AIDS. But the
Times
had one hundred reporters and editors working for the Metro pages (looking for “trends” in the city, Rosenthal said). Besides Larry Altman, the M.D., there were ten other specialists on the medicine-science-technology desk, the largest such reporting staff in American journalism. The staff put out Science Times every Tuesday. Kinsella offered a number of explanations for the reporters’ performance. Some had their own priorities. According to Kinsella, Altman was intrigued with artificial-heart research and became convinced that it would be the medical story of the decade. But Kinsella looked beyond the reporters, the desk editors, and the staff to the top editor. Kinsella heard the same voices every
Times
monitor encountered; his principal explanation for the
Times’
inattentive coverage was that Abe Rosenthal fostered a “homophobic atmosphere” in the newsroom. As a result, homosexual men at the
Times
kept their distance from the editor, and heterosexual reporters shied from proposing stories about AIDS.

Kinsella made a serious allegation, one with much greater resonance
than whether Rosenthal’s friends—a Jerzy Kosinski, a Beverly Sills, or a Betty Friedan—were treated as cultural icons, or whether the designer windows of a
Times
advertiser like Macy’s were accorded special news coverage. By mid-1991, 20,000 New York City residents had died from complications resulting from AIDS. As of the same date, more than 30,000 New Yorkers had been diagnosed as having AIDS and an estimated 150,000 other New Yorkers were HIV-positive—their blood, when tested, indicated the presence of the AIDS virus. No vaccine or curative treatment was then in sight. Indifferent or tardy reporting of AIDS by the presumptive journalistic agenda setter would affect the federal health establishment’s own responses. But Kinsella marshaled no direct proof of Rosenthal’s homophobia. He cited “reports” of the use of the words
faggot
and
queer
at editorial meetings, without attributing these slurs to Rosenthal. Kinsella interviewed Max Frankel, who also passed on second-hand information: Some staff people had told Frankel of their belief that “if reporters [during the Rosenthal regime] got to be known as excessively interested in homosexuals or were themselves thought to be homosexuals, something would happen to them.”

Kinsella offered indirect evidence of homophobia, such as the
Times’
treatment of the news about a virus affecting the dancing Lippizaner horses of Austria. The story of the illness of the horses, a Viennese tourist attraction, appeared on page one of the
Times
of March 28, 1981. The prominence of the account, juxtaposed with the modest attention given the Kaposi’s story by Altman and his editors two years earlier, made for obvious irony. It did not advance a theory of the
Times’
willful neglect of AIDS. The Lippizaner treatment proved only that on one day, one offbeat “medical mystery” caught the interest of a single page-one meeting.

Larry Kramer, the playwright and a founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis organization, went over some of the same ground, collecting examples of what he considered to be the
Times’
selective attention to
AIDS in the Rosenthal years. Thus, Kramer compared the
Times’
initial AIDS coverage with its coverage of the Tylenol tampering case in 1982. Containers of the nonprescription drug Tylenol had been opened, laced with cynanide, and returned to supermarket shelves in the Chicago area. Seven Tylenol poisoning cases were reported over a three-month span. By Kramer’s calculations, the
Times
wrote about the Tylenol contamination story on fifty-four separate
occasions; on four days, the story made page one. By contrast, said Kramer, in the first nineteen months of the AIDS epidemic, with the number of cases totaling one thousand, only seven AIDS stories appeared in the
Times
, none on page one. Again, the “pattern” demonstrated little other than the fact that
Times
editors judged the Tylenol story to be big news. Tens of millions of consumers take over-the-counter pills for headaches and minor pains each day; hundreds of products lie on supermarket shelves, vulnerable to criminal tampering (the makers of such products have since developed “tamper-proof” containers). Kramer assembled other such examples. He compared the
Times’
AIDS coverage with the coverage in other big-city newspapers, including the
Washington Post
and the
Philadelphia Inquirer.
In one period in 1983, New York City was reporting more new AIDS cases each week than the
yearly
totals for Washington and Philadelphia combined. Yet, according to Kramer, the
Times
lagged behind the
Post
and the
Inquirer
in both the number of AIDS stories published and in the quality of the reporting. To him, the case for Rosenthal’s and the
Times’
homophobia was obvious. Rosenthal was a “monster” and the
Times
“the enemy of gay men and women,” Kramer declared. Seven years later, Kramer explained his anger at the
Times
in an interview in the magazine
Tikkun.
“If the public had been told that a transmissible disease was going around and that they had to start cooling it, an awful lot of people who are dead would be alive today,” he said. “I harp on the
Times
because … it has the most influence.”

In my own interviewing of
Times
people I heard many of the same charges; one editor remembered being present in a group when Rosenthal complained about “the place being full of Ivy League fags.” The man, an Ivy League graduate
and
a homosexual, nevertheless had been hired by Rosenthal and his career had flourished during the Rosenthal years. Still, it’s easy to accept the argument that a “perception” of homophobia existed among the
Times
staff. Anyone who has worked in a newsroom—Kinsella served as editorial-page editor of the Los
Angeles Herald Examiner
—understands that what Rosenthal thought mattered perhaps less than what the
Times
staff
believed
Rosenthal thought. Consequently, no knowledgeable outsider has difficulty accepting the
Times
reporters’ belief that their proposals for stories about AIDS, and about the homosexual victims of AIDS, stood a poor chance of being published. At the same time, no executive, however energetic, is able to take every supervisory editor aside for
instruction, let alone every staff member. In large news organizations, the institutional values filter down from the top to the bottom: They are “in the air.” The word “osmosis,” not so incidentally, often came up in talks about news work with
Times
reporters and desk editors.

Subtly or unsubtly, the newsroom atmospherics began shifting at the
Times
in 1983. The staff’s gut perceptions, and the day-to-day news coverage, changed as well. Punch Sulzberger and his editor Rosenthal were under renewed pressures from gay and lesbian organizations to pay more attention to AIDS. The homosexual “community” in New York was, as Schanberg suggested, mainly young, white, middle class, and well educated (in many ways, its members resembled the model reader of the “new”
New York Times
). By the spring of 1983 it also had gotten organized. Sulzberger’s assistant, Sydney Gruson, held a meeting at the
Times
with representatives of homosexual organizations. Rosenthal later met separately with the representatives. One of the participants at both meetings, Virginia Apuzzo, then executive director of the National Gay Task Force, later described the session with Rosenthal as “Gays and AIDS 101.”

Rosenthal was a good student. He came out of the meetings with several story ideas, including a suggestion for a story on Apuzzo, who worked in the administration of New York Governor Mario Cuomo. Always the news hound, constantly pushing the
Times
to be on top of trends, Rosenthal “began to demand more on AIDS,” according to Kinsella. Within three months of the Gays and AIDS 101 meeting, the
Times
produced a two-part examination of the impact of AIDS on “ordinary people.” Each article ran almost 3,500 words on consecutive days in June 1983.

Gradually, staff fears of retribution because of too-close “identification” with gay and lesbian topics dissipated—at least sufficently for story suggestions to flow up the newsroom hierarchy to Rosenthal.
Times
reporter Susan Heller Anderson was told by a friend—a man she described as a homosexual and a physician—to
expect a surge in AIDS cases. Anderson passed on her friend’s views to Edward Klein, then editor of the
Times Magazine
, and offered to do an article for the
Magazine.
Klein, in turn, told Rosenthal of the doctor’s expectation of “tremendous” death tolls “among homosexuals in the creative areas of life, such as dance, fashion, advertising, music, etc.” Klein said he was prepared to give the assignment to Anderson but thought that
Rosenthal might want the story instead for the news pages. Rosenthal sent on Klein’s memo to Richard Flaste of the science desk, calling the information “interesting.” Rosenthal added: “It seems to me to be a daily story and one that should be handled by your department.”

Rosenthal’s
Times
continued to irritate some of its angrier critics. Spokesmen from homosexual groups complained about the paper’s refusal to use the word gay as a noun in its news columns. Rosenthal replied that the usage was “too politicized.”
Times
editors also elided—for reasons of “good taste”—some of the specific facts of virus transmission. The omissions contributed to the “mystery” of AIDS; what did the phrase “intimate sexual contact” actually mean? Clifton
Daniel, long retired but still a careful reader, chided Rosenthal when the
Times
missed the story of Esmé O’Brien Hammond, “a socially prominent New Yorker,” as Daniel described her, who had died of AIDS as a result of a blood transfusion. Both New York tabloids, the
Post
and the
News
, included that information in their stories; the
Times
made no mention of AIDS. “I take the trouble to mention this to you,” Daniel wrote, “because I had difficulties with a certain squeamishness on the
Times
when I was there, and I keep hoping someone will overcome it, while maintaining the paper’s standards of good taste.” Rosenthal replied in his elbow-in-the-face style. He turned the letter over to his associate Allan Siegal, who did a Nexis search; it produced forty-eight references to “anal intercourse” in
Times’
stories about AIDS in the period 1981 to 1986. The printout was sent on to Daniel with a covering note signed by Rosenthal. “Dear Clifton: 48!” the letter read in entirety. Daniel replied that while he was “gratified to learn that the subject of sodomy is being so well covered these days, and that, journalistically speaking, the
New York Times
has come out of the closet,” the number of references to anal intercourse “is not exactly responsive to the question I raised” about Mrs. Hammond.

The
Times
was not alone in its initial squeamishness. Other newspapers also discreetly drew the Victorian curtain across too-graphic references to sexual practices that caused tears in the rectal tissue, or to the swallowing of semen during oral intercourse (both possible ways of HIV transmission). But the
Times’
elisions invariably attracted more attention than the parallel shortcomings of other news organizations—such was the burden of being the standard of journalistic performance. Some AIDS organizations had adopted the slogan “Silence Equals Death.” The obverse was, in their minds, “Publicity Equals Funding.”