The inflated staffing figures, while altogether fictitious, reflected two salient problems that haunted the journalism of AIDS for years. First, reporters were willing to believe any story handed to them in a press release without the slightest inclination to discover whether the reported facts were true. Press-release journalism, out of vogue since the advent of Watergate-style investigative reporting, made a dashing comeback with the AIDS epidemic. The second tendency evident in AIDS journalism was the compulsion to lend a reassuring last note to otherwise bleak stories.
