AIDS and Media Coverage, the Early Years: A Longreads List
Logan Sachon is a writer and editor based in Portland.
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Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals
1981. New York Times. Lawrence K. Altman.
903 words / 3.5 minutes
No mention of AIDS, no utter of HIV, but this is where mainstream media’s coverage of AIDS starts, with the New York Times first mention of a new disease in 1981.
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1987. St Paul Pioneer Press. Jacqui Banaszynski.
21,000 words (est) / 84 minutes (note: not Instapaper-friendly)
This Pulitzer-winning three-part series follows Dick Hanson — farmer, political activist, and gay man — from diagnosis to death. The writer describes the piece as such: “I wanted to be able not just to write about a disease, but THIS disease and all that went with it … the prejudice, the fear, the distance, the judging, the legal, financial and moral consequences, the lifestyle and the love …” Many people cite this article as the first time they were really drawn in to the AIDS crisis.
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1989. New York Times Magazine. Larry Josephs.
3,695 words / 15 minutes
1990. New York Times Magazine. Larry Josephs.
5,905 words / 24 minutes
Larry Josephs, 34, writer about AIDS, dies of the disease
1991. New York Times. Alessandra Stanley
360 words / 1.5 minutes
In these two essays, Josephs writes first about his diagnoses and treatment and then about what happens when he gets very sick. Heart-wrenching personal voice coupled with details and research from someone who desperately wanted and needed to know everything about the disease. Honest, brave first-person journalism.
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Out of control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science
2006. Harper’s. Celia Farber.
12,163 words / 48 minutes
From 1987 to 1995, Farber wrote a column in SPIN about AIDS called “Words from the front.” (Those articles can be found here.) She was one of the first and only journalists to cover scientists who questioned the link between AIDS and HIV and questioned the use of AZT to fight it. These scientists — including National Academy of Sciences member and Berkeley researcher Dr. Peter Duesberg — were labeled “AIDS denialists” by the scientific community, and Farber’s coverage of them put her in that pot, too. This article was published in 2006, but Farber had been writing about its topic for nearly 20 years. The piece provoked heated responses, including letters from the scientists who are credited with discovering HIV. This response from the Columbia Journalism Review is in line with the criticism of the piece, the author, and its thesis.

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