It was the mid to late 90s and I was living in Lakeland Florida at the time. Florida Southern College is in Lakeland and it is, or I should say was, a morally conservative Christian based College. I don’t know what it’s like now.
I guess whatever organization on campus sponsored speakers was responsible. But they had a pair of young gay men with AIDS come to do a speech to the student body. They had about 1,500 students attend as I recall.
Afterwards I am reading the Tampa Tribune news article that was written about this by a female staff writer who attended the speech. This is where it gets interesting. I’m going to be off a percentage point or two but not much.
These two guys got up there and told all these college student the CDC statistics showed that about 92% of AIDS cases were heterosexual and about 8% were drugs and other related. I knew right off that was a pile hooey. So I contacted the staff writer at the Tribune and she sounded like a young journalism graduate with head full of liberal mush. I told her that the statistics were completely the opposite of what the reality was. I said that 92% were gay men, the other 8% consisted of women who had sex with “bisexual” men, drug users and blood transfusions and a statistically insignificant number contracted between normal heterosexual individuals. I also pointed out that it was dangerous to give such medically incorrect information to these kids.
She got rather indignant with me when I asked her, at that point did you research this before you printed it? She replied, well they said it was the case so I assumed they had researched it. I asked her why did you make that assumption? Indignant response ensued. I, the troglodyte, had insulted her journalistic integrity. I then said to her I will get you the CDC statistics and I will show you that what I’m saying is correct. That the numbers they claimed were the reverse of reality.
So I went to the CDC website, I got all the relevant statistics which proved I was completely correct. I then called this girl and gave her this information with the CDC source so she could look it up. She looked it up and admitted that I was correct. So I asked her when The Tampa Tribune was going to print a correction on the article since they had printed incorrect & dangerous information to a lot of college students. Again an indignant response. She said she wasn’t going to print a correction or retraction - that was up to her editor and he wouldn’t do it.
All in all just about what you expect from a liberal rag like that, and another pretend journalist who thinks that changing the world is more important than reporting facts.
And this is just a classic example of the whole propaganda campaign to make AIDS into a heterosexual disease rather than do anything to prevent long and painful deaths of homosexual men. Yes, many did it to themselves, but at least some might have modified their behavior if the truth had been told. The gay lobby and their so called supporters made sure that wasn’t going to happen.
Disgusting, but hardly surprising. “Journalistic integrity” is an oxymoron.
And now I get appetite killing un-skippable ads for homo drug treatments while trying to watch internet programming - NOT sponsored by the content creators. I did learn that when a black guy has his braids wrapped up high on his head avoid using the restroom at the same time. CBS cares.
Whatever was reported was tailored to push the emerging Woke agenda.