Man Bites Dog (I): The Compassionate Media   

Pursuing stories about human tragedy doesn't always bring out the best in the media. But one clergyman caught up in a horrifying family saga came away with high regard for the decency of the reporters he encountered.

The Rev. Jimmy Allen, 68, a Southern Baptist minister in Big Canoe, Georgia, found himself in the midst of a story upon which any reporter would love to pounce. His son, Scott, who was also a Southern Baptist minister, was married to a woman named Lydia who had contracted the AIDS virus through a transfusion when their first son, Matthew, was born in 1982. Matthew was born HIV-positive. Little was known about prevention of the fatal virus at the time, so when Scott and Lydia had another baby, Bryan, two years later, he too was born HIV-positive.

As if enduring the terminal illness of his daughter-in-law and two grandchildren wasn't enough, Allen also learned in 1985 that his other son, Skip, who owned an art gallery in Dallas and is homosexual, was also HIV-positive.

While Allen was struggling to cope with the tragedy that had befallen his family, an ordeal that might call into question even the most pious person's faith, he also found himself in the midst of a battle between his son and the Southern Baptist Convention. Scott's church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, fired him after discovering that his family had been ravaged by AIDS. Then Scott and his family moved to Dallas, where local churches refused to allow Matthew to enroll in Sunday school. Allen says the resulting isolation threw him into a "spiritual struggle that was really a crisis for me."

Sounds like a story the media simply couldn't resist: a family with four members stricken by the AIDS virus, a minister grappling with his faith, a political battle within the church, a religious figure with a son living an alternative lifestyle, an innocent child as pawn. One would think the media would be beating down Allen's door to uncover this cruelly coincidental story. But as it turned out, the media took the ethical high road.

Whenever Allen was contacted for media interviews, he explained that the family didn't want to discuss the matter until Matthew, then 3 years old, was older and better prepared to endure media scrutiny. In general the media complied, postponing plans to break the story until Allen indicated the time was right. In fact, Allen says the media was so sympathetic to his concerns that he vowed at the time "to be as candid as possible and to tell the world to challenge stereotypes about the media."

"I don't think we ought to stop the news from happening or being told," says Allen, who works with the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center on its "Bridging the Gap" project. "But when human life is at stake there has to be an exception, and both TV and print reporters understood that."

Allen continues, "The word 'media' is an all-inclusive one, so it's very deceptive. Really, there's no such thing. There are individuals who work in the media of communication, and most of these people are professionals just trying to do their jobs. They can be professional without being cruel or unfair, and I wasn't surprised that they were responsible."

Eventually, after the family decided Matthew was ready, they went public with the story and found that the media continued to maintain a high level of professionalism and respect. Allen says that in dozens of interviews he had only one negative experience. He declined to participate in one television news program because he thought it had an agenda that would take the focus off of his sons and grandsons. When the program eventually did air, the narrator said Allen had refused to participate because he and Skip were "divided by dogma." "I thought that was a rather cheap shot," Allen says.

Allen jokes that in dealing with the media, his openness probably creates more problems than reporters with ulterior motives. "I don't duck questions, so that gets me in trouble," he says. "I'm always getting into trouble because I'm quoted accurately. I often wish I could say it was because I was misquoted."

Allen, who ultimately decided to tell his own story in a recently released book called "The Burden of a Secret," says he learned a lot from his interaction with the media, as well as from surviving the many trials of being close to those living with AIDS. "I've discovered," he says, "that amazing grace is not just a song."