And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

by Randy Shilts

The San Francisco Chronicle struck pay dirt in late November when a Freedom of Information Act request unearthed hundreds of pages of internal memoranda revealing the serious funding shortages at the Centers for Disease Control. The duplicity of many of the nation’s top health officials was also apparent by comparisons of the newly released memoranda and conflicting congressional testimony offered on virtually the same days. In Washington, administration officials braced for a torrent of journalistic investigations after the front-page Chronicle stories, but nothing happened. To other news organizations, AIDS was a science story or a human interest story, but for years to come, AIDS would not be a story to which standard journalistic techniques applied. Thus, the federal government did not have to fret that news hounds would dog their AIDS efforts. It wasn’t going to happen.