Subject: Letters:  AIDS Media Circus:  Bring in the Clowns
Date: Published: 12/11/91 (31 lines)
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

    Letters to the Editor --
    AIDS Media Circus:
    Bring in the Clowns

    Thanks for Dorothy Rabinowitz's "Television:  The Magic
 Circus" (Leisure & Arts, Nov. 18).  She said it well.  Why is
 it now heroic to become infected with the AIDS virus by
 virtue of some presumably grossly promiscuous behavior?  What
 a travesty of media hype.  What an example to the young.
    I'm sure Ms. Rabinowitz will take more flak for that
 column than a B-17 over Schweinfurt in 1944.  What may have
 been the first round was fired on the C-SPAN early-morning
 journalist talk show on the date the column appeared.
    C-SPAN talk-host Brian Lamb mentioned the Rabinowitz
 column, eliciting a comment from guest Jack Nelson of the Los
 Angeles Times disagreeing out of hand and revealing himself
 as one of the clowns in the media circus Ms. Rabinowitz had
 so aptly described.
    Ms. Rabinowitz is right.  The "Magic Johnson" situation is
 indeed "a private tragedy inflated beyond measure, whose
 human face now lies buried ...in humbug."
    William J. Hopwood
    Miami

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