OutRight
by Dale Carpenter

The Gay Media Strikes Out

Unquestioning in their portrayal of Gore as the golden boy and Bush as the boogeyman, the gay press’s coverage of the presidential campaign lacked independence and depth.

The presidential campaign laid bare a discomfiting fact: Much of the gay media appears incapable of covering politics in a professional fashion. Whatever your political affiliation or ideology, that is troubling.

Many of us rely heavily on gay newspapers and magazines to learn what politicians are saying and doing on specifically gay issues. For that reason, they have a special function and responsibility to their audience.

This doesn’t mean gay media should be "evenhanded" or "objective" in the sense that they must be indifferent as to pro- and antigay positions or candidates. It does mean they have an obligation to try to be fair and genuinely informative about what are often complex matters. At a minimum, they should maintain some critical distance from candidates and parties. They shouldn’t let advocacy become partisanship.

Unfortunately, when covering the 2000 presidential race, many gay newspapers simply recited the candidates’ positions. Based on these recitations, they concluded-often in "news" stories rather than in editorials0-that Al Gore was by far superior.

Little consideration was given to the candidates’ actual commitment (or ability) to translate words into actions, yet there were strong reasons to believe Gore was deficient on this score. During the campaign, the vice president almost never mentioned his stands on things like employment discrimination laws and the antigay military ban. For that reason alone, Gore would hardly be in a position to claim a mandate on gay issues. The gay media rarely pushed its analysis that deep.

The shortcomings of the gay press go beyond superficiality, however. There was rampant and clear bias. When George W. Bush said something plausibly antigay, for example by using religious-right code language to oppose "special rights," the gay media rightly jumped all over it. But when Bush did or said something positive, gay newspapers dismissed it or reacted cynically

A common complaint about Bush was that he would harm gay rights by appointing conservative ogres to the Supreme Court. It was an argument the gay press uncritically published again and again until it became conventional wisdom.

Yet this nightmare was greatly exaggerated. History demonstrates that presidents have little power to shape the direction of the Supreme Court. And, according to nonpartisan observers, Bush’s record on judicial appointments as governor of Texas has been moderate. You wouldn’t have known either of those things from reading the gay press.

At the same time, Gore got a free pass. When the vice president incredibly professed to have no position on the Supreme Court’s decision allowing the Boy Scouts to exclude gays and said nothing against the policy itself, his evasions and cowardice were barely mentioned in the gay press.

When it was disclosed that Gore had once cultivated a political relationship with the rabidly antigay Rev. Fred Phelps, including sending Phelps tickets to the presidential inauguration in 1997, most gay news outlets ignored it. At least one gay paper, which never reported the original story, published a letter from a gay Democrat discounting it. If a grinning Bush had posed for pictures with Phelps, as Gore did, you can believe the photo would have run on the front page of many gay papers.

In a sorry season of coverage, two egregious examples of partisanship and arrogance stand out. Unfortunately, they come from two of the most esteemed organs of the gay media.

The Advocate, the oldest and largest-circulation gay newsmagazine in the country, published what it called an interview with President Bill Clinton. The reporter who conducted it, Chris Bull, pitched nothing but softballs at the president. Questioning Clinton about the disastrous "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" military policy, for example, Bull excused the president’s fecklessness by blaming gays for the policy. This was too much even for the self-aggrandizing Clinton, who responded that there was plenty of blame to go around.

That was bad enough, but it got worse. Andrew Sullivan, arguably the most influential openly gay writer in America today, observed that Bull’s interview showed the gay media is "not ready for prime time." The Advocate responded by banning Sullivan, a conservative, from its pages.

Shortly before the election, the highly-respected Washington Blade published the results of a poll it commissioned on prospective gay voters’ preferences. The poll found that only 2 percent of gays would vote for Bush. This conclusion was preposterous. In each of the past three federal elections, between one-fourth and one-third of gays voted Republican. Yet the Blade didn’t question the anomalous result.

Even after the election when a national exit poll showed that 25 percent of gays voted for Bush (a figure that likely underestimates the actual gay Republican vote but is consistent with past exit polls), the Blade was still unapologetic. Instead, it republished its pre-election poll alongside the exit poll–as if the two might be equally valid. The only explanation for this, other than haughtiness, is that the Blade simply cannot believe that a large segment of gay voters disagree with its editors’ political preferences.

It wasn’t all bad. Reporters like Bob Roehr, writing for San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter and other papers, intelligently and fairly evaluated the claims made by partisans on both sides. Washington’s Metro Weekly published a lengthy, illuminating, and balanced interview-debate between gay Democrat and gay Republican leaders.

But these were exceptions. Cheer-leading editorials for Gore masquerading as news, tendentious criticism of Bush, ass-kissing interviews, bogus polls, and blacklists of dissenting writers carried the day. As citizens, we deserve better.