TV’s Surprise Reality Show : What’s Missing From News of Johnson’s Plight?

The magic medium embraced the magic man.

You saw his wife, friends, colleagues and other admirers. You saw people with shock on their faces and pain in their eyes. You saw experts on medicine, sports, advertising, public policy, sociology and the human condition. You saw AIDS activists and safe-sex activists.

All for the good. Television was on this story like, well, a condom.

There was one thing you didn’t see, though, in secular TV’s massive coverage of Magic Johnson’s dramatic retirement Thursday from professional basketball after testing positive for the human immunodeficiency virus.

Chastity activists.

There were plenty of people before the camera--including the courageous Johnson himself--who used this sad moment to urge everyone, and kids in particular, to have safer sex. Some newscasts even ran charts showing contraceptive alternatives; one ranked them in order of effectiveness. Very useful.

And there’s no question that Johnson’s potential as an icon for responsible sex is enormous. After a brilliant, transcendent career as an athlete, CNN’s Catherine Crier noted Friday, Johnson will now “champion a new cause--safe sex.”

Yet nowhere in secular TV did anyone urge kids not to have sex. Or at least to think about it more carefully. Implicit in the coverage was the feeling that the trend toward youngsters being sexually active at earlier ages is irreversible.

“That’s like saying kids are all into drinking and driving, and why say no to them?,” said Ronda Chervin, who teaches ethics at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo. “It’s irresponsible.”

Or as Rush Limbaugh boomed Friday morning, opening his syndicated talk show on KFI-AM (640), the operative word for this story is not condoms but “promiscuity.”

Whether you buy it or not, that point of view--the morality argument--was excluded from the coverage. Although surely endorsed by many Americans, the belief that juvenile sex is flat-out wrong--and that the best way to combat it is through preaching premarital abstinence--found no place in the voluminously reported Magic Johnson story.

It was almost as if television had been converted by the growing sexual pervasiveness in its own programming--from tabloid shows to local newscasts to prime-time entertainment series--during this and other ratings sweeps months.

“The bias of the media toward abstinence education surfaced and broke through in the emotion of the tragedy,” charged the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Orange County-based Traditional Values Coalition.

Sheldon emphasized that he shared the prevailing sympathy for Johnson. But he noted also that KCBS sportscaster Jim Hill, a personal friend of Johnson’s, was at times so visibly distraught that only with great difficulty was he able to speak about Johnson’s plight.

“Setting aside the very personal tragedy of Magic Johnson’s virus,” Sheldon said, “I think the press was in such emotional shock that their elevator didn’t run to the top floor. The objectivity of the media went out the window. They talked to the wrong people.”

The right people, according to Sheldon, are the abstinence or “family values” people who, even in the best of times, are often subjected to snickering coverage in the media. “We’re shown as being archaic,” he said.

The chastity message was available on “The 700 Club,” the fundamentalist-style religious program created and hosted by Pat Robertson.

“Unless Magic really promotes the idea of abstinence for people, it’s not going to be safe sex,” Dr. David Gyerton, president of Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va., said Friday morning.

Omitted from the rest of TV, though, that message wound up reaching only the already converted, a fact that some would argue compounded the tragedy.