Some
Reflections on the Sorry State of AIDS
Journalism by
Celia
Farber,
August 24, 1998 I have attended, as a reporter, eight
International AIDS Conferences -- in
Washington, D.C., Montreal, San Francisco,
Stockholm, Florence, Berlin, Vancouver,
and this year, Geneva. They are uniformly
awful, a total waste of a journalist's
time. Mostly I go just to fortify my
belief that AIDS -- the entire industry
and social machinery of it -- is at its
root a totalitarian system. By that, I
mean that there is a central ideology that
seeks to enforce its domination by
methodically obstructing any ideas that
run counter to it. This is no place for
journalists. "Media" -- to the extent that they are
present, are only there for decorative
purposes. If any rogue journalist actually
asks a question -- a real question -- he
or she is met with a sea of frowning faces
and hisses. Microphones are shut off. I've
even seen guards called in and seen
one journalist
expelled from the country (in this
case Germany) because he asked questions
the AIDS establishment didn't like. These
conferences are about the enforcement of
an ideology -- not the questioning of it.
I have said in the past that they resemble
a kind of 'October Parade' for the AIDS
party. I realize that to the average American,
when I say "AIDS" you think of perhaps
Liz Taylor or Elton John and
red ribbons and marches and quilts and
candles and all kinds of benevolence. All
of that stuff is probably well intentioned
enough. But the real force driving the
AIDS super-structure, what pulses just
beneath the patina of do-goodism -- is an
industry of awesome, relentless, amoral
power -- the pharmaceutical industry. I'll
return to the question of media in a
moment, but first, let me quantify what I
just said. These "International AIDS Conferences"
are really just microcosms of the AIDS
industry itself. They are funded by,
driven by, and controlled by the
pharmaceutical industry. In Geneva this
year, there were pharmaceutical ads
plastered right onto the luggage-conveyor
belts at the airport. At every conference, the leading
pharmaceutical giants take up an entire
stadium-sized floor with their structures
-- mini-villages that they build, complete
with huge video screens, towering pillars,
interactive displays and all kinds of
goodies, including CDs, videos, carry
bags, condoms, ice cream, chocolates and
whatever else they can imagine will lure
conference delegates into their
booths. |
2. Glaxo-Wellcome, maker of the now-fallen
former pinnacle AIDS drug AZT, routinely
pays for the first-class travel and hotel
accommodations of scores of so-called
activists, mostly from ACT UP. Most of the doctors present are there
courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry,
and in addition to their travel expenses
and per diems, they are invited to a
constant series of lavish lunches and
dinners. Many of the doctors who write for
medical journals about the effects of
these AIDS drugs are paid consultants to
the drug companies.
It is, in short, a
festival of sophisticated
whoredom. I thought I had seen it all, but this
year in Geneva, in the pressroom, I saw
something that made me think for a second
I was having an acid flashback. I picked
up what looked like a copy of USA
Today. It was USA Today,
complete with the logo and everything. But
all the text -- every story -- on the
cover was about drugs. In fact, it was all
about Glaxo drugs, and it was all glowing,
glowing. Then I saw in fine print at the
bottom of the page that the entire cover
spread had been bought by Glaxo -- the
copy written by its employees! And this
"special edition" was going out all over
Geneva, looking for all intents and
purposes like a copy of USA Today,
where the staff had just suddenly
decided to enlighten the world to the
wonders of Glaxo's drugs. Each morning in the media room,
envelopes were laid out by pharmaceutical
reps, addressed to the reporters from all
the major papers. You'd see them open the
envelopes, walk over to a laptop and start
typing. "They all look like they're doing
their knitting in there," remarked my
friend Huw Christie, editor of the
AIDS dissident magazine Continuum.
(A "dissident" is
simply a person who questions the
establishment's AIDS
hypothesis.) At the 1993 conference in Berlin, when
the results of the so-called Concorde
study blew to smithereens the long-held
hogwash that AZT was a life-extending
drug, I vividly recall an incident that
seemed to say it all. Outside the conference entrance stood a
man with a sign that read: "Down With
AZT," or something to that effect. Well,
the poor man was set upon by an angry mob
of activists (ACT UP), some of whom
sported neon hair and Mohawks. They broke
his sign in half, took his fliers and
ripped them up, shoved him to the floor,
roughed him up, and then set his materials
on fire. It later emerged that these
AZT-loving fanatics -- who by the way were
never disciplined -- had all been flown in
courtesy of Wellcome. |
3. For those of you who have not been
following the AIDS-media scoreboard all
these years, I can sum it up as follows:
The mainstream AIDS media have botched the
story virtually beyond repair, by
constantly repeating, without any
scrutiny, the pronouncements of the
federal government's AIDS
institutions. They bought
wholesale the totally unfounded notion of
a heterosexual AIDS "explosion," based on
no evidence at all, and indeed it never
happened and won't ever happen.
They uncritically reported that AZT
was a wondrous, life-saving drug, based on
studies that were fraudulent and funded by
the drug's maker. (Instead it turned out
to shorten lives.) They failed to report
that the U.S. AIDS scientist Robert
Gallo had stolen his HIV viral sample
from the Pasteur Institute, even though it
was as plain as day, and they also,
inexplicably, never questioned Dr. Gallo's
totally unsubstantiated 1984 announcement
that HIV was the proven "cause" of AIDS.
They continue to invent an AIDS epidemic
that is decimating Africa, even though all
African countries afflicted by AIDS are
reporting population growth. And they went
hog wild with the "AIDS Is Over" stories
of 1996, which credited the new cocktails
with bringing people back from the dead.
Now the tide has turned, and the drugs are
proving to have horrific side effects and
little effect on mortality. But not one of them has lost a job, or
even been reprimanded -- because AIDS
journalism is only a facade. I realized
this this year in Geneva when I attended a
panel discussion on "AIDS and Media
Responsibility." A bunch of journalists
were up there, and in the middle sat Miss
America. They spoke in the usual way,
about how the media's "responsibility" in
AIDS is this and that. About how important
it is to "educate" the public. About how
journalists shape cultural responses to
AIDS. I finally couldn't stand it anymore,
and I went to the microphone in a rare
moment of spunk. "The problem," I
told them, "is this kind of talk, all this
talk about 'responsibility.' There is no
responsibility, no more and no less than
for any other story. The only
responsibility a journalist has is to
investigate, to report. We are not Boy
Scouts or missionaries or agents of the
greater good. We are
journalists." They shut my mike off. A woman from the
panel who was from a small West Indian
island came up to me and said: "I think I
know what you mean. I keep hearing that in
my country we have over 400 cases of AIDS
and that the numbers are growing, but it's
not true. We have about 18 cases. But if I
say that, they tell me it's
irresponsible." | 4. She laughed. "Is that what you
mean?" I told her that's exactly what I
mean. It is a virtual fulfillment of Orwell's
dystopia, where the party dictates that
what is untrue is "responsible" and that
what is true is "irresponsible." How swollen, how grandiose, to think
that we, as AIDS reporters, have some kind
of higher "responsibility," some kind of
job that is more complex, more portentous
than that of any other journalist on any
other subject. All of this is really a
thinly veiled argument in favor of
propaganda. Journalism unravels, reveals
-- at best, disturbs. Propaganda, by
contrast, operates on an emotional plane,
and forces a constant focus on what is
seen as a greater good. "Its task," in the
words of Goebbels himself, "is to
keep the people persuaded, and to mold
coming generations." Goebbels was quite
open in his disdain for factuality: "This
shows the difference between propaganda
and people's enlightenment," he said.
"Propaganda is a revolutionary-political
concept. People's enlightenment limits
itself to informing the people in a more
factual way about existing necessities and
questions." At one press conference featuring AIDS
figureheads Dr. Anthony Fauci (head
of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases) and Dr. David
Ho (cocktail enthusiast), some
dissident journalists asked probing
questions about what proof existed for
HIV's isolation. A colleague of mine
overheard a reporter sighing and rolling
her eyes in exasperation. She then walked
up to Dr. Fauci and whispered audibly:
"How do these people get press passes? We
have to do something about this!" Activist Mark Harrington, also
on the panel, shouted: "Why don't you
people have your own conference? Why do
you have to come here?" We later learned that the complaints
about our presence at the conference came
not from the AIDS leaders, and not even
from the pharmaceutical reps; It came from
journalists -- who probably don't even
realize that they have left the realm of
journalism and floated off to a quiet,
well-run place where there are no
questions, no disturbances at all, and
truth is in total
eclipse.  Special
contributor Celia Farber covered AIDS
for Spin for a
decade. |
ALL
OF THIS has a disturbingly familiar ring:
different hemispheres, different topics,
different arguments, but the same Big
Money and muscle men being used to
propagate wrong views.
write to David Irving