Beat the Press
Kaufman, Leslie
i i 1 TT\ oon after Newsday published a book reKpO 1" Tr|CI L/*V3C C ^ view by Michael Fumento, the newspa-JL/v/dv ULJ.V/ X JL V/Ou V—J per's book editor, Jack Schwartz, began Death...
...But these weren't FBI death threats, these were bullshit death threats...
...Fumento theorizes that only magazines with circulations above 100,000 or so are singled out...
...When Donahue does that with your book, you could sell 20,000 to 50,000 additional books in the next weeks...
...The article was written by Joe Queenan, known mostly for humor writing, and had a light, irreverent tone...
...We began hearing back about a number of controversial meetings at publishing houses," remembers Hartley...
...And when he speaks on college campuses, he is mau-maued by angry protesters...
...Even The Advocate, a newspaper aimed at homosexual readers, wrote, "Look, the guy is a pig . . . But that doesn't mean he is wrong about the spread of AIDS...
...Moreover, there was every reason to believe that Myth would continue to have an audience...
...After his book was published, Fumento was summarily fired from his job as an editorial writer at Denver's Rocky Mountain News and spent two years unemployed...
...The title of his 1990 book says it all: The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS...
...Branding a heretic In 1987, Fumento, then a legal affairs reporter for The Washington Times, wrote an article for Commentary magazine in which he dared to challenge the widespread notion that AIDS was the next bubonic plague...
...An anonymous note branding Lynch a homophobe appeared on the bulletin board at his newspaper...
...As a guest on a local talk radio program, he was besieged by hostile and sometimes violent callers...
...The decision was uncharacteristic of Basic, which has a reputation for keeping books in print even when back-orders for them are low...
...says Hartley...
...find today...
...Lynch, a veteran of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Newsday, says that in all his years in journalism he "never got this kind of response...
...He mocks government-funded "sex-equals-death" campaigns which depict low-risk, straight, white people in their ads...
...He is routinely called a racist and a homophobe in print...
...HarperCollins doesn't even have back copies...
...Like this article, it was more concerned with the backlash against Fumento than evaluating the merits of his views on AIDS...
...Even before Fumento published his book he had become the target of AIDS activists...
...March 1993/The Washington Monthly 35 certainly do get it, from shared needles, from transfusions, from clotting factor which hemophiliacs use to control internal bleeding, from their mothers at or before birth, and sometimes through sexual intercourse with persons in these categories and with bisexuals...
...Fumento concedes that Waldenbooks did eventually place an order for the book—but only after he singled them out during an appearance on C-Span...
...News & World Report to the normally stoic Atlantic were busy predicting an AIDS apocalypse...
...The primary myth, however, was that the disease was no longer anchored to these risk groups but was in fact going from heterosexual to heterosexual to heterosexual through intercourse, that it was epidemic among non-drug abusing heterosexuals...
...Fumento is no right-wing gay-bashing crusader, but his theories have policy implications that strike at the core of the AIDS activist agenda...
...HarperCollins doesn't even have back copies...
...The calls came seven or eight a night for a month...
...It received fairly favorable reviews, something of a surprise considering its politically incorrect content...
...Schwartz wasn't exactly surprised by the abuse...
...In it, he theorizes that despite dire predictions in the media, AIDS will not devastate white middle-class heterosexuals as it has homosexuals and poor minorities...
...One friend characterized the discussion in-house as being 'heated.'" Another editor friend wrote Hartley, "Fumento makes good points, but I am not convinced that the cause of curing AIDS—for those who have it or are prey to it—is best served by publishing this in book form...
...Of course, Myth was also drumming up the kind of controversy book publicists dream of...
...The numbers coming out of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, he said, were being widely misinterpreted and the spread of AIDS exaggerated...
...Like Myth, it is a challenge to medical orthodoxies...
...Fumento's work is so focused on the outrages perpetrated on the public by the AIDS-research publicity machine that he often seems indifferent to the plight of those who are actually dying of the disease...
...Needless to say, more popular tabloid journalists had also embraced the worst case scenario with a passion...
...Not long after the review appeared, Schwartz was "zapped...
...For this story, Fumento sent me a copy of the book he photocopied himself...
...In 1987, reputable outlets from U.S...
...They made a lot of threats," Schwartz recalls, "not the least of which was death...
...They have repeatedly attempted to silence him, often by resorting to violent intimidation, and they have almost succeeded...
...HarperCollins says it did its best for the book, and Shapiro points out that it had a much larger publicity budget than most...
...If the marketplace of ideas becomes so unsafe that only our pit bulls do that job, we all lose...
...Ultimately, the fate of Myth is best explained by the very orthodoxies that it sought to expose...
...Fumento's piece, however, caught the attention of right-wingers who helped get him appointed to the U.S...
...The leaders of the contingent entered the office of Malcolm Forbes, who promptly gave in to their demands...
...It is increasingly true that journalists who write heretically about AIDS will face some kind of retribution...
...But Fumento's story is a particularly vivid illustration of just how effective the extremes have been in controlling the bounds of acceptable discourse on AIDS...
...Both Queenan and an Act-Up activist who worked at Forbes at the time say Forbes's statement was untrue...
...He is still seething...
...On the other hand, Kolata's obituary for Act-Up and other AIDS advocacy groups may be premature...
...The huge Walden-books chain didn't order any copies of Myth...
...A major advertiser—a car dealer—called the newspaper and demanded that Lynch's column be pulled...
...Kolata is more reflective than indignant about her experiences, saying that the intimidation is primarily psychological and poses no physical threat...
...When The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS was finally published in 1990, it got off to an auspicious start...
...Just months after taking the job, he exposed these designs in an article for The New Republic, detailing the many ways in which the political ends of the Reagan administration were directly at odds with a rational response to containing the disease...
...Two days after the magazine hit the newsstands, 40 Act-Up activists stormed Forbes...
...Well before the book was published, Bill Newlin, Fumento's editor at New Republic Books, got his hands on an angry letter from the owners of a gay bookstore to other book stores and to big chains, demanding that they refuse to carry the book...
...Even Queenan admits, "They gave me death threats...
...While the personal harm inflicted on Fumento by his opponents is in itself an injustice, his tale offers an equally sobering lesson about the politics of AIDS: that some sectors of the news media and publishing industry have given in to pressure from activists for fear of being branded the unenlightened accomplices of anti-gay conservatives...
...He has also just finished a new book, Science Under Siege, which he bills as "a serious counter-argument to the media claims about technological threats to human health and the environment...
...But considering that plenty of truly homophobic and pseudo-scientific books on AIDS sell like hotcakes—The AIDS Cover-Up, for example, which advocates quarantining HIV-positive individuals, has sold 230,000 copies—the obvious question is why a thoughtful writer like Fumento has been singled out for retribution...
...But his lack of sensitivity (or even compassion) is no reason to dismiss his views...
...They Leslie Kaufman is an assistant editor at Government Executive Magazine...
...In June 1989, Forbes magazine ran a short piece on Fumento's controversial views...
...On the commission, he realized that conservatives were using the new epidemic to further an old political agenda: prayer in schools, chastity (rather than sex) education, and anti-homosexual legislation...
...Kolata also received several hundred angry, threatening Christmas cards at her home, again courtesy of Act-Up...
...It was clear very few of the callers had actually read the review, says Schwartz...
...Fumento's theories on the spread of AIDS aren't ones you commonly hear, but they are not off the medical charts...
...Fumento is certainly not the only AIDS writer who has been harassed for having an unpalatable point of view...
...What went wrong...
...James Enstrom, a respected epidemiologist at UCLA who asked at first to speak anonymously because he feared retribution, said Fumento hit the nail on the head when he described "how the disease has been warped out of all proportions to how it occurs in society...
...Fumento, who has never actually received a death threat himself, seconds Kolata's assessment...
...Who is Michael Fumento...
...They remain committed to silencing journalists they disagree with...
...Commission on Civil Rights as an AIDS specialist...
...Fumento made appearances on the "Today" show, "Sonya Live," and "Donahue," where the father of daytime talk hawked the book...
...Nasty calls...
...Forbes told the activists he had been out of town and had not seen the story before it was published...
...By this time, Fumento's magazine articles, including one in The American Spectator called "The Incredible Shrinking AIDS Epidemic," had attracted the attention of AIDS activists...
...There were other indications that Myth would provoke a violent reaction...
...Martin Kessler, the editor of Basic Books, gave Hartley his justification: "The reps [who sell the books to buyers] refuse to carry it...
...Unfortunately, as Jack Schwartz learned the hard way, not everyone can agree to disagree...
...In early 1987, Oprah Winfrey opened her show with these words: "Hello everybody...
...Queenan was so furious at how Forbes handled the Fumento story that he left the magazine a few months later...
...AIDS has both sexes running scared...
...Fumento's attraction to this kind of confrontational story has led many of his colleagues to conveniently dismiss him as a trouble-seeker...
...They save death threats for people who they think they can scare," he says...
...Why buy a book like that...
...And, of course, he received a truckload of less than solicitous mail...
...i i 1 TT\ oon after Newsday published a book reKpO 1" Tr|CI L/*V3C C ^ view by Michael Fumento, the newspa-JL/v/dv ULJ.V/ X JL V/Ou V—J per's book editor, Jack Schwartz, began Death threats and bullying tactics follow AIDS journalists who contradict the conventional wisdom by Leslie Kaufman receiving anonymous phone calls late at night...
...At the beginning of last year he got hired again by the Investor's Business Daily on the condition he wouldn't write about AIDS...
...Unfortunately, the question points to the answer: It is precisely because his arguments are legitimate that Michael Fumento is a threat...
...That is, his name and phone number were published in large, bold type in Outweek...
...Writers seldom risk physical harm, but the harassment and the threats are disincentive enough...
...Mike Ferrari, Walden's buyer, is reputed to have told representatives selling the book that he didn't want it for political reasons...
...They would call me and say 'Don't turn on your car this morning,' and I don't have a car...
...There had been intense foreign interest —major magazines in Germany and Australia had run cover stories on Fumento, as had many London papers—and the book was certainly causing a stir in the United States...
...What outraged these people was not the content of the review, which was very even-handed," he says, "but that we allowed this guy to write anything at all...
...Fumento and his agent, Glen Hartley, began looking for a publisher and soon ran into trouble...
...But Fumento's book didn't sell 50,000 or even 20,000 copies...
...The New York Times Book Review, for example, called it "legitimate and soundly reasoned...
...The angry commentary that accompanied the number and invited readers to share their rage with Schwartz ran: "Why the fuck would Newsday have such a hate-filled, untalented, lying loser review important books...
...Bumper stickers appeared on Times boxes throughout New York saying, "GINA KOLATA OF THE NEW YORK TIMES IS THE WORST AIDS REPORTER IN AMERICA...
...Eventually, New Republic Books, a subdivision of Basic Books and HarperCollins, agreed to publish the book...
...The issue was Michael Fumento himself...
...Of course, Fumento does occasionally write freelance pieces on AIDS...
...Hartley and Fumento believe it was sabotaged from the top of the line on down...
...36 The Washington Monthly/March 1993 Having alienated his natural allies, Fumento left the Civil Rights Commission to turn his articles on AIDS into a book...
...Myth has a chapter entitled, "The AIDS Lobby: Are We Giving It Too Much Money...
...But he was just beginning to feel the heat...
...Washington Journalism Review and Cosmopolitan carried reprints of the column...
...Research studies now project that one in five—listen to me, hard to believe—one in five heterosexuals could be dead of AIDS in the next three years...
...Gina Kolata, a science writer for The New York Times, found herself the target of a vicious campaign in 1990 after she wrote a story describing why many health care professionals objected to the liberalized distribution of experimental AIDS drugs...
...Any journalist seriously thinking of tackling AIDS or another hot-button issue would have to consider the cautionary tale of Michael Fumento...
...Not surprisingly, the story was ignored by the mainstream media...
...Just ask The Albany Times Union's Lynch, who writes a weekly column on the media...
...Act-Up members called Kolata's editors and her colleagues at other newspapers to complain that she was incompetent...
...But it wasn't long before Fumento showed how, in trying to be honest about AIDS, he offended everyone...
...But the fact remains that The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS is impossible to The fact remains that The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS is impossible to find today...
...Besides, she argues that Act-Up is so splintered these days that it's not much cause for concern...
...The biggest blow to Fumento came when Basic decided not to reprint the book and didn't tell him until there were so few copies in stock that even the book's publicist, Lois Shapiro, had run out...
...Of course, Fumento and Hartley's charges can't be proved...
...For example, his piece in this magazine ["Technical Foul: Not even Magic can change the facts about AIDS," December 1992], a review of Earvin "Magic" Johnson's What You Can Do to Avoid AIDS, drew no direct response from Act-Up...
...While that may be true, challenging half-baked conventional wisdom is supposed to be the media's job...
...Last spring, he was amazed by a Gallup poll showing that Americans identified AIDS as the greatest health threat to the country...
...Since AIDS was the number 11 killer in America that year—behind cancer, diabetes, and even liver disease—Lynch suggested that the media had exaggerated the threat...
...The Civil Rights Commission promptly searched his office, demoted him to researcher (civil servants are hard to fire), and ordered him not to speak to the press...
...Acting up Of course, not everything Fumento has published on the topic has provoked an activist backlash...
...He is perhaps the most politically incorrect AIDS writer in America...
...The Journal of the American Medical Association called Fumento's book "thoroughly researched, poignantly written, and a must read for anyone interested in learning the dynamics of the HIV epidemic or health care planning...
...In it, Fumento implies that the government should pare back what it spends on AIDS research—about $2 billion in fiscal 1992—and start an educational campaign that explicitly describes the special dangers of anal sex in spreading AIDS...
...Do you know what that means...
...Others, such as Gina Kolata of The New York Times and Daniel Lynch of The Albany Times Union, have also been singled out for harassment by AIDS activists...
...In the next issue, Forbes published a lengthy, lightly edited response from Act-Up explaining why Fumento's views were "dangerous" and his own editors were "irresponsible...
...Hearing the words 'Mike Fumento' is like hearing the words 'Kent State.' It just brings back nothing but bad memories," he says...
...An editor of the now-defunct New York gay publication Outweek had previously made clear to him that Fumento was persona non grata, and that giving him a forum would carry serious consequences...
...In an introduction to the statement, Forbes added, "In the case of Michael Fumento's speculations in a forthcoming book, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, I find his views asinine...
...In fact, it sold about 12,000...
...Asked why the book didn't sell well, Clinton Morris, the Basic representative who sold to Waldenbooks in New York, says, "Look, it was going against everything we know about ADDS, against anything anybody who was reputable was telling us...
...The core of his thesis runs as follows: The myth of heterosexual AIDS consists of a series of myths, one of which is not that heterosexuals don't get AIDS...
...the circulation of The Washington Monthly is approximately 30,000...
...Even if Fumento offends personally, he is someone who belongs in our national debate on AIDS...
...The proof of this supposition is in the company Fumento keeps...
Vol. 25 • March 1993 • No. 3
