Subject: AIDS and Other Hot-Button Issues 
Date: Published: 12/31/90 (127 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    LEISURE & ARTS -- Television:
    AIDS and Other Hot-Button Issues
    ----
    By Dorothy Rabinowitz

    Prime-time TV continues to plumb the depths of our social
 problems, and never more so than in the next few weeks, when
 the schedule crackles with hot-button issues of the most
 galvanic sort:  abortion, AIDS and, that theme-de-resistance,
 child molestation.
    Tonight, in addition to her many other troubles, Rosie
 O'Neill must defend a woman who has killed her own daughter
 (CBS, 10-11 p.m. EST).  On Wednesday, "48 Hours" provides a
 gruesomely detailed portrait of health-care workers infected
 with AIDS (CBS, 8-9 p.m. EST).  The weekend brings the CBS
 Sunday Movie "Bump in the Night" (9-11 p.m. EST), about a
 college professor who molests boys -- very young boys.  Next
 week's episode of "Law & Order" focuses on an abortion clinic
 bomber (NBC, Jan. 8, 10-11 p.m. EST).
    The next night we are back to AIDS, when the intrepid
 district attorneys on ABC's "Equal Justice" (Jan. 9, 10-11
 p.m. EST) prosecute an AIDS carrier who has infected a young
 woman.  No one can accuse the networks of ringing the new year
 in on a frivolous note.
    The "48 Hours" segment is, not surprisingly, the program
 that packs the biggest punch, since it's a documentary
 dealing in real AIDS cases.  In the course of the action a
 physician in charge of a hospital emergency room goes public
 with the news that he has AIDS, something he's withheld from
 patients and everyone else except a few members of the staff.
 Often when he was on duty, the doctor reveals, he went off to
 cry, because he felt worse than most of the patients he was
 treating.  The hospital officials, the lawyers in particular,
 don't conceal their apprehension about the doctor's on-camera
 revelations.
    They have cause for concern, as the program's opening
 report -- about the young woman federal health officials
 believe contracted AIDS from her dentist -- forcefully bears
 out.  Kimberly Bergalis, a 22-year-old Florida woman, makes no
 secret of her fury at the dentist (now dead of AIDS) for
 concealing his condition; she is now suing the insurance
 company that sent her to him.  She spends much of the rest of
 her time agitating publicly for patients' right to know
 whether the health professionals treating them have AIDS or
 are HIV-positive.
    Most of the film's most dramatic reportage bears out the
 view that many health professionals are at particular risk
 for AIDS.  This is where the program's troubles begin, for "48
 Hours" -- like so much of the rest of the major media
 treatment of AIDS -- labors under a heavy burden of political
 constraint.  These politics decree certain rules.  First, AIDS
 victims must be presented not simply as suffering fellow
 humans deserving of our deepest concern, which they assuredly
 are, but as heroes.  Second, the rule as regards the conflict
 between AIDS patients' privacy rights vs. public safety is
 that privacy wins.  Liberal principle dictates this, and
 anyway, or so the prevailing argument goes, the danger to the
 public is negligible.
    Obedience to this second rule required some fancy stepping
 on the part of the folks who put this "48 Hours" together.
 What the reporters have filmed implies one thing, while what
 the reporters say -- or more precisely what they declaim --
 broadcasts another.
    Shouldn't she consider the cost to AIDS sufferers -- the
 stigmatization -- that would result if they were made to
 disclose their condition?  reporter Erin Moriarty asks Ms. 
 Bergalis.  Particularly since the danger of AIDS transmission
 by health professionals is so very small?  
    Such arguments about minimal risk cut no ice with Ms. 
 Bergalis, who responds, unanswerably, "But look at me -- I'm
 the one that came down with it, and it took my life away."
    The things the program writers could not bring themselves
 to say outright are, in their absence, glaringly obvious.  Any
 concession, for example, that fear of being treated by an
 AIDS-infected health professional might be something other
 than hysteria or bias.  But what the script will not say,
 outright, the film does manage to show, with considerable
 clarity.
    One of the most striking scenes is of a trauma unit in a
 Miami hospital, in which a young surgeon and others working
 to save a gunshot victim are splattered full in the face with
 blood and vomit that gets past masks, and gloves.  This sort
 of thing takes on a certain alarming significance, in light
 of the statistics offered -- that one out of every five
 people coming in with a gunshot wound is carrying the virus.
    An AIDS-infected New York City pediatrician whose identity
 is concealed says he hides his condition from his patients
 because they don't need to know and because mothers with
 babies "tend to be emotional."
    "48 Hours" in short manages, despite shilly-shallying, to
 deliver what is, in the end, a tough and harsh picture of one
 aspect of the AIDS crisis.
    In the fiction department, social-issues category, ABC's
 "Equal Justice" is worth mentioning mainly because it is so
 striking an example of the sort of thing that has been going
 on in scriptwriting for a while.  This is the kind of program
 in which four or five different story lines are thrown in,
 affording viewers the opportunity to graze or doze, depending
 on which bores them least.  A few minutes of sustained story
 line is all we are asked to absorb before, bam, the action
 lurches elsewhere -- which in the case of the AIDS segment is
 a stroke of fortune for everyone concerned.
    "Law & Order's" treatment of the theme of abortion, it
 should be said, is in distinguished contrast to the rest of
 these televised sermons.  It is a commendably well-written
 treatment of an abortion-clinic bomber.  It cannot quite
 escape unfairness, suggesting, as it inevitably does, a link
 between the fanatics who bomb clinics and the pro-life
 movement overall.  One of the strengths of the series is its
 casting, and to appreciate how true that is one has only to
 look at the restrained and altogether hypnotizing performance
 of Caroline Kava as the right-to-life group's leader.  The
 chief flaw in this script is the obviousness of the way it
 wears its political heart on its sleeve.  The script's last
 line equates the right to legal abortion to the black
 liberation from slavery -- a glorification of abortion that
 even its most ardent advocates might consider a trifle
 excessive.

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the 
personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the 
hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering 
from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]