The following is a combination of two posts from my Blog. I called out the Baptist News on a hack piece attacking the gay community and thanks to a reader they responded.

After my years spent in the newsroom biased reporting sticks out like loose nail to me. Recently some hack named Michael Foust at the Baptist Press wrote an article about how AIDS was increasing in the American gay community.

I’m willing to bet that Mr. Foust never went to journalism school or had any official training because I’ve seen better articles written by high school students. First of all the cites a report released by the Centers for Disease Control but doesn’t provide a link to it in his article. Nor did he contact anyone at the CDC for any sort of perspective for what this study might mean.

Back when I was a reporter I contacted the CDC several times and they were very quick and supportive when it came to finding experts for me. Not to mention there was a tele-briefing with Dr. Ronald Valdiserri, the deputy director of the National Center for HIV, STD and TB prevention which was posted on the web later that day with a phone number for follow up questions.

I suspect the main idea was to get this fact in front of Baptist Press sheep, I mean readers: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data Dec. 2 showing that the number of newly diagnosed HIV and AIDS cases has increased 11 percent among homosexual men. The data spanned a four-year period ending in 2003.”

If Foust had ready the text of the tele-briefing he would have seen this quote from Dr. Valdiserri:

At this point, I do need to stress that HIV/AIDS diagnoses are not the same as new HIV infections, and in fact, trends in HIV/AIDS diagnoses reflect the combined effect of any trends that might be taking place in new infections, as well as trends in HIV testing.

That directly undermines Foust’s contention that AIDS cases are increasing, the data doesn’t say that, Dr. Valdiserri doesn’t say that, it’s just that increased testing is increasing the number of diagnoses, not the number of infections themselves.

The reason Foust probably didn’t link to the report was it has several disturbing racial implications. Blacks have the highest rates of infections bar none. Here’s what Dr. Valdiserri said, “Of these 125,800 people newly-diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in these states, between 2000 and 2003, 51 percent were African Americans, even though African Americans represented just 13 percent of the population in these 32 states.”