The HIV/AIDS Epidemic and Public Broadcasting

Introduction

Although activism had been growing since the early 1980s, coverage of activist demonstrations increased significantly in 1989. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), the most prominent AIDS activist group, was founded in 1987. ACT UP engaged in direct action, meaning that its protests creatively represented particular issues faced by people with AIDS and provided specific solutions to those problems. Direct action was also a strategy used during the Black Civil Rights Movement; similar to sit-ins, ACT UP’s die-ins involved the dramatized performance of a problem and demonstrated viable solutions. Sarah Schulman, a journalist and author who was involved in ACT UP during this period, wrote,

In this moment of collision, the message must be impossible to avoid. It can be funny, but it has to be attention getting; it needs to be insightful. It has to be visually arresting; it cannot be a cliché. In that brief moment of stepping into the sight line of the powerful, shunned people use direct action to be understood. And they are making two things clear: (1) the specific content of their demand for change, and (2) that they will never stop fighting for their survival.⁶⁹

The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, June 22, 1990.

Commercial network television and public broadcasting coverage of their demonstrations played a significant role in communicating ACT UP’s messages and demands to the general public and to specific organizations. In 1990, The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour dedicated a segment to examining the success and strategies of ACT UP. The segment included interviews with ACT UP founder Larry Kramer, ACT UPer Jorge Cortinas, AIDS Quilt creator Cleve Jones, Dr. Mervyn Silverman of amfAR, and Dr. Paul Volderbing, among others. John Roszak of KQED credited ACT UP with achieving the following successes: lowering the price of HIV drug AZT twice; speeding the release of Ganciclovir, which was used to prevent blindness in AIDS patients; and the invention and adoption of parallel tracking, which allowed people with AIDS to be prescribed new treatments while they were being tested. The segment included footage from several ACT UP demonstrations, such as Stop the Church, a demonstration at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, which will be discussed more fully below; a protest against travel bans on people with HIV at the Sixth International AIDS Conference; and a human blockade of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

By broadcasting footage from direct action demonstrations, the programs included in this section aided the spread of ACT UP’s criticisms and demands on their own terms. In AIDS activist and author Vito Russo’s “Why We Fight” speech, he famously stated, “If I’m dying from anything, I’m dying from the sensationalism of newspapers and magazines and television shows, which are interested in me as a human interest story—only as long as I’m willing to be a helpless victim, but not if I’m fighting for my life."⁷⁰ ACT UP was consistently critical of media coverage of the epidemic, and their demonstrations were designed to use the news as a tool. Ann Northrop, journalist and activist, summed up the relationship of ACT UP to the media in Robert Hilferty’s controversial documentary Stop the Church: “We communicate through the media, not to the media.”

The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, June 22, 1990.

Notable items in this section include Stop the Church: Issues and Outrage, a KCET program about the controversy surrounding PBS’s cancellation of Stop the Church; an AIDS Quarterly segment on the experimental drug Compound Q; and a MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour episode that was disrupted by ACT UP.

Drug Approval

One of ACT UP’s main goals was to get treatments for HIV/AIDS approved efficiently and ethically without double-blind placebo trials and then made accessible to everyone who needed them. The FDA drug approval process was long and complicated, and ACT UP activists believed that the process was unnecessarily delaying the distribution of potentially effective treatments against HIV/AIDS. The FDA first approved AZT as a treatment for HIV/AIDS in 1987, but it was the only FDA-approved treatment on the market.

On October 11, 1988, ACT UP organized a demonstration at the FDA to demand the speedy approval of more HIV/AIDS treatments. Seize Control of the FDA was ACT UP’s first major protest, with 1,500 activists in attendance. Footage from Seize Control of the FDA was included in the first installment of The AIDS Quarterly, which is available for viewing at the Library of Congress and GBH. This protest successfully led to the development of accelerated drug approval processes and new treatment regulations by the FDA, described by FDA Commissioner Dr. Frank Young in a NewsHour interview. In a retrospective essay on the action, activist Douglas Crimp wrote,

If ‘drugs into bodies’ had been central to ACT UP from the beginning, the protest at the FDA represented both a culmination of our early efforts and a turning point in both recognition by the government of the seriousness and legitimacy of our demands and national awareness of the AIDS activist movement. This turning point occurred for two interrelated reasons: 1) the demonstrated knowledge by AIDS activists of every detail of the complex FDA drug approval process, and 2) a professionally designed campaign that prepared the media to convey our treatment issues to the public.⁷¹

The AIDS Quarterly, “The Trial of Compound Q; Money and Morals,” (WGBH, Boston, January 31, 1990).

In 1990, ACT UP similarly demanded an increase in HIV/AIDS treatments and better representation of women and people of color in drug clinical trials at the National Institute of Health. In coverage from the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, activists can be seen wrapped in “red tape” at the Bethesda campus.

While the FDA was slow to approve treatments, people with AIDS and community organizers searched for alternatives. Trichosanthin, or Compound Q, was a Chinese abortifacient and cancer drug believed to help treat HIV/AIDS. Compound Q was tested in San Francisco on AIDS patients without Institutional Review Board (IRB) or FDA approval by Project Inform, an advocacy group for people with HIV/AIDS. These patients were usually people with AIDS who responded poorly to FDA-approved treatments.

The underground trials of Compound Q were controversial because they skirted conventional regulations on drugs. WGBH’s AIDS Quarterly covered Compound Q in its Winter 1990 edition. The segment included interviews with Martin Delaney, AIDS activist and founder of Project Inform; Compound Q patients; Dr. Alan Levin, the immunologist who conducted the trials; and others. Project Inform was clear that Compound Q was not a miracle drug, but that it was worth trying. Dr. Levin, who became involved when he learned that people were taking Compound Q in unsupervised doses, told an interviewer, “Now, it’s not a simple treatment and it’s not a safe treatment. And the odds are very good someone’s going to die of this treatment. I mean, we’re not kidding ourselves, this is not just a magical panacea.” The program also included footage of Dr. Levin and Delaney discussing whether or not to keep the trial going when patients continued to become sick.

A 1991 episode of Minnesota Public Radio’s Midday explored the ethical debates around the approval of AIDS treatments. The program examined the process of peer review and the function of a review board, which are part of drug approval processes and typically considered standards of ethics. Dr. Levin stated, “I don’t need a committee to tell me what’s ethical…. I’ll do what I think is best for my patient with my patient knowing full well what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.”

The programs in this section demonstrated the desperation of activists and people with AIDS to get access to effective treatments. By the time the FDA approved AZT, more than 25,000 people had died of AIDS. ACT UP’s pressure on the FDA resulted in the shortening of the drug approval process by two years.⁷²

Stop the Church

Perhaps ACT UP’s most well-known demonstration, Stop the Church was a controversial protest against the Catholic Church and, more specifically, Cardinal John O’Connor, Archbishop of New York. In the 1980s, Cardinal O’Connor condemned the use of condoms to prevent HIV transmission, advocated against sex education and condom distribution in public schools, criticized needle exchange programs, and opposed abortion rights.⁷³ Gay activists believed that O’Connor’s public statements urging parents and others to take action against these public health efforts contributed directly to the rising number of AIDS-related deaths.⁷⁴

On December 10, 1989, more than 5,000 people participated in an ACT UP and Women’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM!) protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. The protest, which took place while Cardinal O’Connor offered mass, consisted of a rally outside the cathedral and a die-in inside. Protestors disrupted the service by chanting “Stop killing us” and laid their bodies on the floor between pews, performing their own deaths, their friends’ deaths, and the deaths of other people with AIDS.

Left: Filmmaker Robert Hilferty at a Stop the Church planning meeting. Right: The die-in at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Stop the Church: Issues and Outrage (KCET, Los Angeles, 1991).

Writer and activist Robert Hilferty’s footage from the planning of the protest offers an intimate look into the functioning of ACT UP. Hilferty, who became involved in ACT UP in 1987, used a Hi-8 camera to record the planning and execution of the protest.⁷⁵ The Hi-8 was a new, handheld camera available in 1989 that recorded onto 8mm video tapes, and its portability allowed Hilferty to document activists up-close and in the moment. Hilferty filmed as members debated the ethics of disrupting a church service, and both Catholics and non-Catholics involved in the action aired their criticisms of O’Connor and the Catholic Church at an organizing meeting. Using footage from ACT UP meetings and from the protest itself, Hilferty created a documentary called Stop the Church.

Hilferty’s film presented ACT UP in an entirely new way. ACT UP carefully strategized their television appearances, and this film documented an insider’s view, showing activists Ann Northrop, Larry Kramer, Michael Petrellis, and David Robinson, among many others, planning the demonstration. Stop the Church won the award for best documentary at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

PBS picked up Stop the Church for its documentary series POV, but didn’t flag it as controversial due to a preoccupation surrounding their airing of Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied, which more than 100 PBS stations refused to air.⁷⁶ One month after Tongues Untied was broadcast, PBS issued a statement declaring that it would not broadcast Stop the Church nationally because “its pervasive tone of ridicule overwhelms its critique of policy. In addition, it does not meet PBS’s standards for quality."⁷⁷ POV executive producer Marc Weiss would later claim that the issue was not one of content, but of timing.⁷⁸

The cancellation of Stop the Church only fueled controversy. Scholar B. J. Bullert recorded more than sixty newspaper articles written about the cancellation within the first week of its announcement.⁷⁹ Susan Dowling of WGBH in Boston said that by being overprotective of member stations, PBS was “perpetuating protection of content, and by extension, homophobia. Whatever the programmers’ claims, they have a damaging effect."⁸⁰ Although Stop the Church was removed from POV, local public television stations could still broadcast the documentary. KCET in Los Angeles designed a program around the documentary and controversy, and the station faced mixed reactions. Rev. Gregory Coiro from the public affairs office of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese told Bullert, “We felt this was a very bigoted piece, and that it was anti-Catholic and had no place on television."⁸¹ Director Robert Hilferty disagreed with accusations of “Catholic bashing” against the documentary and said, “It is a linguistic travesty to equate my political critique of Cardinal O’Connor with the fists, knives, and bats of gay bashers."⁸² Hilferty here referred to “gay bashing,” or homophobic assaults against gay people, which had increased with the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.⁸³

Stop the Church: Issues and Outrage (KCET, Los Angeles, 1991).

KCET’s program Stop the Church: Issues and Outrage was designed to fairly present the documentary and controversy. The program opened with a statement intended to address critics head-on. KCET President William Kobin prefaced the showing of the documentary by firmly stating,

One of the mandates of a public television station is to explore significant issues of controversy and present a wide diversity of opinion and programming, including opinions which may not be popular and material which may not be to everyone’s taste. Stop the Church is such a film, and we believe that you and every citizen should have the opportunity to see the film, hear the issues discussed, and make up your own mind.

Following the documentary, the program aired a taped press conference from Cardinal Roger Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles, who condemned the KCET program and said that KCET leadership “has abdicated its role of responsible community leadership by agreeing to air the blatantly anti-Catholic film Stop the Church.” Then host Jeffrey Kaye moderated a debate panel, which included Paul Freese from the Catholic League, Jesuit priest Father William Wood, Lee Klosinski of AIDS Project LA, and Rev. Stephen Pieters of Metro Community Churches.

The panel discussion represented many responses to the documentary and KCET’s decision to air it. The panelists debated the ethics of ACT UP’s tactics, the use of condoms to prevent HIV transmission, the Church’s influence on public policy, and safe sex education. On the effectiveness of ACT UP militancy, Pieters said, “I feel an urgency as a person with AIDS. I may not have a lot of time left. I want results now. And if it hadn’t been for ACT UP, I’m not sure that we would have the AZT that is keeping us alive longer. I’m not sure that we would have the DDI [Didanosine] that is helping us stay alive longer.”

Stop the Church: Issues and Outrage (KCET, Los Angeles, 1991).

This panel was followed by a press conference that earlier had been given by William Kobin on KCET’s decision to broadcast the program, then another panel discussion with Tracy Westen, Professor of Media Law at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communications, and Van Gordon Sauter, former president of CBS News. Sauter called the documentary a “tantrum” and a “dreary film.” Westen, on the other hand, argued, “It is a legitimate, important point of view that needs articulation.”

KCET was both praised and criticized for the program. George Weigel, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, claimed that the documentary was “an attack on the American democratic experiment because it is an attempt to stop the conversation—the ongoing conversation about the ordering of our lives, loves and loyalties that is the democratic process at its most basic level."⁸⁴ In support of the decision, viewers donated a total of around $65,000, and one viewer walked into the station with a $500 check.⁸⁵ After KCET’s program aired, other local public broadcasting stations decided to air the documentary, including KQED in San Francisco, WGBH in Boston, North Carolina Public Television, Wisconsin Public Television, and WNET-TV in New York.

The Day of Desperation

On January 22, 1991, ACT UP staged the Day of Desperation, a series of protests that aimed to bring attention to the desperation of people with AIDS. ACT UP members argued that media attention about the Gulf War, which began on January 16, 1991, was “accompanied by manufactured anti-Arab sentiment and generalized fear” and was “a monumental distraction from the real problems of the AIDS crisis, a huge waste of money, and an exploitative use of racism to justify a war."⁸⁶ As part of the Day of Desperation, several groups of ACT UPers successfully disrupted two news programs: the CBS Evening News and The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. On CBS, a protestor was shown chanting “Fight AIDS, not Arabs” before the network cut to a commercial.

Five protestors entered the NewsHour’s WNET studio in New York in the middle of the telecast, which focused on the Gulf War. At that time, co-anchor Robert MacNeil was off-camera, so the protest was not broadcast. Instead, co-anchor Jim Lehrer in the NewsHour’s WETA studio in Washington prolonged his interview and let viewers know that demonstrators had infiltrated the New York studio. Several ACT UPers handcuffed themselves to MacNeil’s desk. In an interview for the ACT UP Oral History Project, Ann Northrop, who was involved in the CBS disruption, said that MacNeil talked to the activists for a while before they were removed by police.⁸⁷ After they were removed, MacNeil went back on air and explained the disruption:

It was a group of people who called themselves ‘non-violent demonstrators’ from the ACT UP AIDS group, who complain that we and the media are spending too much time and attention on the war in the Middle East, which they say will never kill as many people as are dying of AIDS. And I told them that this program has spent a lot of time on the AIDS matter and will continue to be interested in it, and we will be covering it more in the future.

Despite their failure to appear onscreen, the protestors successfully communicated their message through The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. The Day of Desperation disruptions also were covered by the New York Times.⁸⁸

Next: 1995-1997: New HIV/AIDS Therapies and Strategies