HUFFINGTON
12.09.12
OUT AT THE TIMES
of how to do research,”
according to Mark Harrington of the New York
chapter of ACT UP.
After a blistering article attacking Kolata’s
reporting appeared in
the Village Voice (Kolata
calls it “the nastiest article I have ever seen in
my life”), some activists
noticed she was taken
off the beat for a while.
ing the country’s other
largest newspapers: the
Los Angeles Times, the
Washington Post and the
Chicago Tribune.
A comparison of the
major dailies during
the period from 1990
to 1992 using Nexis, a
computer information
service that catalogs
numerous newspapers,
showed that the LA
sy. “In a way, our attacks
on her weren’t a success,” he says, “because
it didn’t result in their
improving the coverage
but rather in their taking
her off the beat without
replacing her and then
throwing the drug-development stories onto the
“The lack of coverage in the
early years of the epidemic
was just criminal.”
— Stephen Miller
Not true, says Kolata. “I
had letters and memos
from top management
telling me not to stop
what I was doing.”
But there certainly are
fewer stories now regarding drug research. Harrington thinks The Times
pulled Kolata back a bit
because of the controver-
business pages.”
The reason that The
Times has been so carefully scrutinized is simply because it is the most
influential, most important news organization in
America — not because
it’s worse than any other
newspaper. ln actuality,
The New York Times is
better on gay and AIDS
issues than most metropolitan dailies, includ-
Times, because it is a
substantially larger paper than most, had significantly more stories
about gays than any of
the other three papers
and almost double that
of The New York Times.
The Los Angeles
Times’s Victor Zonana,
who is gay, has done