Joseph Lovett, a broadcast news producer and documentarian who made one of the first long-form network television segments on the AIDS crisis and who plumbed his own personal tragedies in works that blended reporting and public health advocacy, died on July 14 at his home in Manhattan. He was 80.
The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest, his grandnephew Sayer Pease said.
As an openly gay producer, Mr. Lovett was a rarity in the broadcast news world of the 1970s and ’80s. Working at CBS and ABC, he pursued news segments aimed at destigmatizing gay life in the United States and drawing attention to the AIDS crisis at a time when that subject was largely overlooked by mainstream news organizations.
In May 1983, when Mr. Lovett produced the first long-form news segment on AIDS for the ABC News program “20/20,” the disease had received slim coverage since being identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1981. Only a handful of mainstream outlets, including “PBS NewsHour,” The New York Times Magazine and Newsweek, had spotlighted it. After witnessing friends dying of the disease, he resolved to cover it.
In the resulting segment, a young Geraldo Rivera sounded the alarm about the crisis in interviews with public officials, patients, researchers and activists, including Dr. Edward N. Brandt Jr., assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services; Dr. Anthony Fauci, who at the time was an immunology researcher at the National Institutes of Health; and the playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer.
The segment criticized the Reagan administration’s slow response to the crisis and singled out The Times for an absence of AIDS-related articles on its front page. After it aired, letters of support poured in from AIDS patients, health officials and fellow journalists across the country.
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The post Joseph Lovett, TV Producer Who Shed an Early Light on AIDS, Dies at 80 appeared first on New York Times.
