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AIDS

Lewis Lapham, who recently stepped down as editor of Harper’s magazine after twenty-eight years, has long displayed a special disdain for the mainstream press. In the May 2005 issue, he wrote: “Far from being scornful of the messages blown through the trumpets of doom, the news media make a show of their civility and a virtue of their silence; here to please and not to think; every American free to worship the reflection of his or her own fear; no superstition more deserving than another, no imbecile vision in the desert that can’t be sold to a talk show, a circus, or the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives.”

Lapham was referring to the press’s context-free rendering of the National Association of Evangelicals’ plan to inject its faith even deeper into American politics. His comments apply just as easily to his own magazine’s handling of Celia Farber’s piece on AIDS in its March 2006 issue. For the last fifteen years, Farber has been among the loudest proponents of the notion, put forth primarily by a lone virologist, Peter Duesberg, that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS. In her Harper’s piece, Farber executes a jarring bait-and-switch, devoting most of the first three-quarters of her fifteen-page article to a well-reported examination of a horribly botched AIDS drug trial in Uganda, before veering off into her well-worn rant about how conventional wisdom on AIDS is the product of a conspiracy between greedy scientists and their benefactors, the pharmaceutical companies.

Under Lapham, Harper’s has made great sport of ridiculing all manner of establishment thinking, so publishing Farber is not entirely out of character. What is out of character, especially in light of Lapham’s routine swipes at his brethren in the press for what he sees as their infuriating weakness for stenography and intellectual dishonesty, is that Farber was allowed to argue her cause without wrestling — even a little bit — with the mountain of scientific evidence to the contrary. If someone unschooled in the AIDS debate were to read the piece, he would assume that Duesberg is the only right-thinking man in the scientific community. Yet, as far back as 1994, the journal Science published a thorough investigation of Duesberg’s claims and found the evidence for them unpersuasive. Many of Duesberg’s so-called supporters quoted in that investigation said they did not so much believe in his ideas as in his right to dissent.

Farber, too, is entitled to dissent. But when dissent morphs into an “imbecile vision in the desert,” as it does in her Harper’s article, then the editors owe their readers the courtesy of being a little less civil, a little less silent.

Iraq

A similarly willful suppression of crucial context underlies the contention — reinvigorated in late March by a White House p.r. offensive — that the press is ignoring the good news out of Iraq in favor of the bad. Such a suggestion is an affront to those reporters who are risking life and limb to cover this story, particularly when it comes from an armchair flamethrower like Hugh Hewitt.

Hewitt, a blogger and radio host, posted this on his Web site on March 21: “The MSM [mainstream media] wants Bush to fail, and as a result MSM’s coverage of Iraq tilts to the IEDs and the terrorist successes and never, ever provides the context that the president did in the press conference today.”

Really? If we look outside our windows and see a school being rebuilt on one end of the street and a school bus on fire at the other, which would Hewitt have us run to cover? For a civil society to function, it must have basic services and security, and if it doesn’t, that’s news by any standard. Consider some of the context from Iraq the president failed to mention: oil production, electricity production, and the availability of household fuel are all lower than they were two years ago. The number of Iraqi civilians killed has more than tripled in that period, as have the estimated numbers of insurgents and foreign terrorists at work. And 87 percent of Iraqis say they want a concrete timeline for a U.S. withdrawal.

Indeed, let’s have all the context in Iraq.

To read the articles in the May/June 2006 issue, click here.

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