![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20141106194720im_/http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2014/10/29/blogs/tbt2/tbt2-tmagArticle.jpg)
David W. Dunlap is a Metro reporter and writes the Building Blocks column. He has worked at The Times for 39 years.
So much isn’t parallel or comparable, I know. But a New Yorker of a certain age (mine, 62) cannot help contrasting the abundant coverage of the arrival of the Ebola virus in the United States with the little-noted emergence three decades earlier of the human immunodeficiency virus.
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20141106194720im_/http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2014/10/29/blogs/tbt1/tbt1-tmagArticle.jpg)
![Lawrence K. Altman M.D.](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20141106194720im_/http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2014/10/29/blogs/atlman/atlman-articleInline.jpg)
With Lawrence K. Altman’s article of July 3, 1981, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” The Times carried one of the first accounts anywhere of a syndrome whose outlines had seemed until then to be no more than terrifying rumor. “Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer,” the article began. “Eight of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made.”
The publication of Altman’s article was a turning point in awareness for many gay men. It served that role dramatically in the movie “Longtime Companion” and in Larry Kramer’s play, “The Normal Heart.” As the play opens, Dr. Emma Brookner recounts to the protagonist, Ned Weeks, how inattentive the press had been. “Last week, which brought you running, The Times ran something on some inside page. Very inside: Page 20.”
Multiple deaths in New York City from a mysterious, fast-acting killer whose spread was incredibly targeted yet disturbingly inchoate. What a story.
I can easily imagine the metro desk of 2015 jumping in to follow up on Altman’s account: “Find out who’s died. Call Larry. Reach out to the families. Speak to neighbors. Try to talk to the patients. What hospitals are they in? Who are their doctors? Learn everything you can. When did they get sick? Where do they live? How old are they? And we’ve got to be clear about possible risks.”
The metro desk of 1981, to which I also belonged, did nothing.
The next article in The Times appeared in August. It was by The Associated Press. By then, more than 100 cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumocystis pneumonia had been reported, overwhelmingly among gay men, almost half of whom had died. Readers waited four months for the next report, on page D24, by United Press International, as five or six new cases were appearing each week.
The Times was “setting the tone for noncoverage nationally,” Randy Shilts wrote in “And the Band Played On” (1987). “There was only one reason for the lack of media interest, and everybody in the [Centers for Disease Control] task force knew it: The victims were homosexuals.”
Not until May 25, 1983, did AIDS appear on the front page; not until 1,450 cases — 558 of them ending in death — had been reported; not until the government’s top health official said the investigation of AIDS would be the “No. 1 priority” of the Public Health Service. By then, however, a dam seemed to have burst at The Times. There were 20 articles on AIDS that month alone.
“Though the newspaper followed developments in the AIDS story, mention of the epidemic rarely appeared in the metro section or national news reporting,” Shilts wrote. “Homosexual reporters, particularly in New York, tended to know their place and keep their mouths shut, if they wanted to survive in the news business.”
I’m afraid that included me. More protective of my career than my community in the early years of the epidemic, I kept my own counsel about how we were ignoring AIDS. My first big story, concerning a new residence for homeless AIDS patients, did not appear until January 1987.
Though one reporter can’t change the course of the Times battleship, I have seen passionate, knowledgeable, persistent reporters nudge it a degree or two. The greatest regret of my career is that I didn’t try to do more, when I might have made a small difference, to improve our coverage of AIDS.
Ebola, by contrast, doesn’t seem to want for friends in court.