Ashe Case Raises Fame vs. Privacy Debate : Ethics: Journalists face gray area of how far to go in reporting on celebrities. The issue is sharpened by athlete’s anguish over revealing he has AIDS.

Time Warner Chairman Steven J. Ross, responding to a gossip item in the New York Post, confirms that he has prostate cancer.

Madonna, battling false rumors that she is infected with HIV, issues a denial after her press agent’s telephone rings off the hook and camera crews stake out her apartment building.

Arthur Ashe, fearing imminent disclosure of his condition by USA Today, goes before 30 television cameras and reluctantly tells the world he has AIDS.

Though the particulars differ, the incidents--all of which took place within the past six months--are stirring a new round of soul-searching in the news media.

In hallway and elevator conversations at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention here, newspaper officials stunned by the news about Ashe pondered the latest clash between an individual’s right to privacy and the public’s appetite for celebrity news.

“Our questions and values are being skewed by the focus on celebrity journalism,” said William Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. “I don’t think that celebrity makes Arthur Ashe fair game.”

Added Kay Fanning, the former editor of the Christian Science Monitor who is teaching a journalistic ethics course at Boston University: “I can’t see why it’s in the public interest to make somebody’s private anguish public. I suppose you could make the argument for (disclosing the illness of Ross), the head of a publicly traded company. But hearing Arthur Ashe plead for his 5-year-old daughter to be spared the taunts of her classmates--this touches me.”

John M. Simpson, managing editor of USA Today International, which rushed its story on Ashe into print in Europe as soon as it learned that the former tennis star had called a press conference, defended USA Today’s approach.

“I believe we acted with the utmost responsibility,” he said in an interview Thursday. “If you have someone coming to you with reports of a serious illness of any kind involving a popular public figure, you have a responsibility to check it out. We didn’t hound him into doing anything.”

Ashe, on the other hand, made it clear at his press conference that he felt his hand was forced after Gene Policinski, sports managing editor for USA Today, told him that in the absence of a denial the paper would keep investigating.

Some editors said stories like those about Ross and Ashe are inevitable.

“We, as a society, go on death watches. It may be wrong, but we do it,” said Chris Peck, managing editor of the Spokane, Wash., Spokesman-Review.

“The fact that you are thrust into the public light even when you don’t want to be is a fact of journalism,” added Dennis Hetzel, editor of the York, Pa., Daily Record.

“It seems to me AIDS incorrectly has all sorts of emotional baggage tied up with it,” Simpson of USA Today said. “The analogy should be with any serious illness.”

But AIDS activists strongly disagreed.

“It’s disingenuous or ignorant for a journalist to say AIDS is just like any other disease and we’re going to treat it like any other disease,” said Carisa Cunningham, director of communications of the AIDS Action Council, a Washington-based group that represents local AIDS service organizations.

“I’m not saying that AIDS, categorically, should not be reported. But there are factors that do not exist with other illnesses--the very real possibility of discrimination, the role stress can play in advancing his illness,” she added. “The amount of stress in Arthur Ashe’s life just went up 1000%, and that cannot be good for his health.”

In defending USA Today’s decision to pursue the story, Simpson also cited “the good that may come out of the process,” as AIDS loses its stigma.

Again, AIDS activists differed.

“If the press really wants to destigmatize AIDS, then there are a lot of things they could do,” said William B. Rubenstein, director of the National AIDS Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. “The press could provide explicit information--instead of veiled language--over how HIV is transmitted . . . . The press can talk more about discrimination and inadequate access to health care. And if the press must invoke celebrities, they can call celebrities and ask them what they’re doing about AIDS, not whether they have it.”

Editors said USA Today’s threatened “outing” of Ashe differed markedly from Earvin (Magic) Johnson’s decision to publicly announce last fall that he was infected with HIV.

“Magic Johnson wanted to become an activist on the issue. Arthur Ashe had other plans, and now he’s been robbed of them,” said Narda Zacchino, associate editor of the Los Angeles Times.

“Once he held a press conference, everybody has to cover it because there is great public interest . . . . But he thinks he was forced into it, and that is tragic,” she added.

Lawrence O’Donnell, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, said: “The rule should be the relevance of a story.”

Even a chief executive officer of a publicly traded company with a potentially fatal illness “is not absolutely a story,” in O’Donnell’s view. “If the company is a one-man show and there are no succession plans, there may be a reason for running a story. But if an organization is well-run and has adequate lines of succession, I don’t see the relevance.

“I don’t know whether we needed stories last week, three days ahead of time, saying that (Wal-Mart founder) Sam Walton was in the hospital and terminally ill.”

Jeff Cohen, executive director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, added: “There is a longstanding journalistic rule that a public figure’s private life should remain private unless it impacts his or her public responsibilities. . . . Instead of investigating the private sphere regarding this or that celebrity with AIDS, mass media could be deploying investigative resources aimed at the public arena--the AIDS research effort, inadequacies in the public health care system, and how homophobia has slowed the effort.”