Why They Wouldn’t Talk About AIDS : COVERING THE PLAGUE AIDS and the American Media <i> by James Kinsella (Rutgers University Press: $22.95; 299 pp., illustrated) </i>

Atlanta. 1982. Dr. Donald Francis, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control, is growing increasingly impatient over the federal government’s failure to properly fund work on a new but ominous disease.

As his frustration mounts, he begins calling the New York Times, the Washington Post and other media outlets, talking to reporters who had interviewed him during his pioneering work on smallpox and other major medical stories. Francis figures a few well-placed stories about his lack of resources--there isn’t even enough money to buy basic lab supplies or to put doors on makeshift offices--will force the Reagan Administration to act. But to his astonishment and chagrin, Francis can’t get a single reporter interested.

“They told me it wasn’t a news story,” he says.

“It” would soon have a name, though--AIDS--and in time, “it” would become very much a news story, a national tragedy responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Francis’ early experience--with the Reagan Administration and the media alike--was, however, all too typical of the prevailing attitude toward AIDS in the United States in 1982 (and in 1983, 1984 and most of 1985 as well). AIDS was “their” disease--it was, after all, initially known as GRID (Gay-Related Infectious Disease)--and few editors or politicians were terribly concerned about it, not in a country still largely uncomfortable with, if not downright hostile toward homosexuality (vide Andy Rooney, Middle America’s foolosopher-in-residence, just this year).

With a few notable exceptions, the American media didn’t cover AIDS in any meaningful way until it seemed to threaten “normal” (i.e., heterosexual) men and women . . . and their children. When an erroneous story in a respected medical journal suggested in the spring of 1983 that AIDS could be spread by “casual contact”--that “children living in high-risk households are susceptible to AIDS . . . (without) sexual contact, drug abuse or exposure to blood products,” a media-feeding frenzy immediately ensued. Then, just as quickly, it faded--until Rock Hudson died in October, 1985. Then, as USA Today editorialized--its irony seemingly unintended--”With Hudson’s death, many of us are realizing that AIDS is not a ‘gay plague’ but everybody’s problem.”

Media coverage of AIDS more than tripled in the next six months.

Why?

Hudson was the first person with AIDS whom we all “knew and cared about,” says George Strait, medical reporter for ABC network news. That connection--”at once personal and impersonal”--became the “most important agenda-setter of all” for the media, writes James Kinsella in his insightful new book.

Kinsella, former editorial-page editor at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, provides a detailed, damning account of media insensitivity, indifference and ignorance, of media squeamishness and sensationalism throughout the early months and years of the AIDS epidemic.

The New York Times? Kinsella says AIDS was “virtually ignored for years by what is arguably America’s journal of record,” largely because A. M. Rosenthal, then executive editor of the paper, was widely thought by his reporters and subordinate editors to be homophobic. No AIDS story appeared on Page 1 of the New York Times until May 25, 1983--by which time more than 500 people already had died of the disease in the United States.

The networks? ABC, CBS and NBC combined devoted 13 minutes to AIDS in the entire year of 1982, and as late as 1985, the only way George Strait could get the words anal sex on the air was to ask Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health to use them in an interview. Kinsella writes about media coverage of AIDS in small cities like Kokomo, Ind.; Arcadia, Fla., and Mesquite, Tex., as well as in such big cities as New York and San Francisco, and he repeatedly comes to the same conclusion--that the quality of coverage almost invariably depended on the quality, the commitment and the courage of the individual journalist. Not that Kinsella automatically praises those journalists who wrote early and often on AIDS. Some of these journalists saw themselves as educators, and Kinsella argues that the educator-reporter “may be a laudable paradigm, but it’s not really what journalism is about. The basis of the craft is telling a story you happened to hear, and that somehow touched your own life so significantly that you want to share it with another.”

True enough. And yet it is also true that the journalists whom Kinsella most praises for their AIDS work--Laurie Garrett, formerly of National Public Radio; Art Kern and Jim Bunn of television station KPIX in San Francisco; Robert Bazell of NBC--did indeed serve as reporters cum educators on AIDS.

Indeed, some of the best AIDS reporting at times came perilously close to being not just education but advocacy--crusading--and while Kinsella is even more critical of that stance, he never fully comes to terms with the incontrovertible fact that were it not for the educators, advocates and crusaders in the press corps, the record of the media would have been even more appalling than it already was on this story.

Thus, Randy Shilts--who provided the most comprehensive early coverage of the epidemic for the San Francisco Chronicle and subsequently wrote the powerful book “And the Band Played On”--clearly engaged in some unprofessional behavior in pursuit of the story. Kinsella rightly chastises him for that. But Shilts’ stories, alerting San Francisco gays to the new dangers of promiscuous sex, probably saved hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives by helping to “tame the voracious sexual appetites of many gay men in San Francisco,” as Kinsella concedes.

Would Shilts’ reporting have been as powerful--and as effective--had he not, as a gay man in San Francisco, become so personally committed to AIDS coverage? Is it possible for a reporter to have both professional detachment and personal commitment on a story? These are interesting and provocative questions, and Kinsella grapples with them but doesn’t ultimately provide satisfactory answers.

His book succeeds as a journalistic account of journalistic failure; it’s less successful exploring the moral and ethical dilemmas of the journalist. Perhaps that’s not surprising. Kinsellas is a working journalist, not a social philosopher.