This Week’s Episode of Reveal: Journalism and Protest at the Dawn of AIDS

This week’s episode of Reveal features WNYC’s Kai Wright and the Nation‘s Lizzy Ratner, hosts of New York Public Radio and the History Channel’s Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows. Wright and Ratner take on the history and politics of the early AIDS crisis, surveying contemporary media coverage, community responses, and the enduring waves of activism that followed the dawn of HIV.

Wright’s look at some of the first reporting on HIV and AIDS brings him into conversation with Lawrence Altman, physician and author of a groundbreaking 1981 New York Times article that brought the little then known about HIV to wider attention; veteran AIDS activist Phil Wilson, and Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases and a leading HIV researcher. Then, through interviews and archival recordings, Ratner sketches the life of Katrina Haslip, whose activism and educational work around AIDS began in the 1980s at New York’s Bedford Hills women’s prison and continued, in conjunction with ACT UP, until her death in 1992 at the age of 33. 

Special thanks to Blindspot, all three seasons of which can be heard at WNYC.