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Editor:
Your lead article last month on changes in Health Department funding rules for AIDS service organizations was a great disappointment. (Health Department Changes ASO Funding Rules, July 1999) You have taken on the complicated and exciting challenge of creating a forum for all of Vermont's LGBT community. That article, however, might as well have been written for a Vermont CARES' in house newsletter. No other ASO was mentioned by name nor does it seem any others were even consulted. While Vermont is a small state and Vermont CARES may be its biggest ASO, it isn't its only one. The Burlington Free Press, The Rutland Herald, and even the Channel 3 news figured that out. You alone relied solely on information gathered from Burlington based Vermont CARES. Had you asked, you would have learned that the Brattleboro Area AIDS Project, for example, was not alarmed by the new rules nor the prospect of maintaining its duty of confidentiality in a slightly modified environment. Had you interviewed representatives from a wider coalition of service providers you would have discovered that not only was Tim Palmer's position on the new rules not uniformly held but you might have questioned why. I am left wondering if you may have missed some of the most significant aspects of the story without this question.
As a community paper, I believe your job is to provide meaningful investigative reporting about all the important issues affecting our community not to be a mouthpiece for any one organization. That's the kind of forum we need. Without the honest debate that good journalism can provoke, we all lose.
Diane Shamas
Putney VT
Editor's note: Although I would dispute the degree of our failure, the bottom line is that you are correct: the article did indeed suffer from CARES-centrism. Our intentions were good: when this story broke late in production, we attempted, unsuccessfully, to contact both ACORN and BAAP. Unfortunately, the change of focus to CARES was neither complete nor completely appropriate, proving that good intentions don't always pan out into good journalism. Your criticism is deserved. For more on the good, the bad, and the ugly in media coverage of this topic, see the Editorial.
