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

by Randy Shilts

News coverage and the lack of it left a profound mark on local public policy. When the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California in San Francisco later analyzed the differences between the municipal responses to AIDS in New York City and San Francisco, it concluded that the disparate quality rested in part on the vast difference in news coverage by the two cities’ major newspapers. Between June 1982 and June 1985, the San Francisco Chronicle printed 442 staff-written AIDS stories, of which 67 made the front page. In the same period, The New York Times ran 226 stories, only 7 of which were on page one. From mid-1983 on, the coverage of the Chronicle focused on public policy aspects of the epidemic, while the Times covered AIDS almost exclusively as a medical event, with little emphasis on social impact or policy. The study concluded, “The extensive nature of coverage by the Chronicle, aside from providing a degree of health education not found in New York, helped sustain a level of political pressure on local government and health officials to respond to the AIDS crisis.”