[Photocopy of the Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1982] Page: 11 of 20
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nity that should be regularly covered. I don't think they're a
specific minority." Ben Bagdikian, the former Washington
Post ombudsman who now teaches journalism at the Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley, disagrees. "Homosexuals
have been treated as an inferior group in society," he says,
"and therefore deserve regular coverage along with other
minorities such as women and blacks."
als. In New York City, the Daily News and the Post
Nor is there any consensus on what to call homosexu-
permit the use of the word "gay," as-do Newsweek
and Time; The New York Times bans its use except
when the word appears in quotations or forms part of
a group's name. Times news editor Allan M. Siegal, who
makes sure reporters conform to the stylebook, explains:
"At the Times we are slow to accept change in usage of
words, and we feel uncomfortable depriving 'gay' of its
traditional meaning."
Strict adherence to this rule can result in bizarre editorial
hairsplitting. Sidney Zion, a former Times reporter who
now free-lances, wrote an article on the resurgence of big-
band jazz that appeared in the June 21, 1981, Times Maga-
zine under the title "Outlasting Rock." Zion's editor spot-
ted a problem in the breezy lead, which ran as follows: "Be-
tween the rock and the hard disco, the melody began to slip
back in. A piano bar here, a big band there, a touch of
Gershwin, a spot of Kern. In gay places and out of the way
places." Zion says he was told that he would have to change
"gay" to "homosexual" to conform with the paper's style
rule. "I said, 'That's crazy,' " Zion recalls. "They said
they would leave it 'gay places' only if I meant to say
'happy places.' They knew very well what I meant, but I
said, 'Okay, if that makes you feel better.' " And so "gay"
was smuggled into print at the Times.
It is curious that a paper like the Times, which editorially
grants gays the status of "a long-abused minority," should
decline to use the term the activist leaders of that minority
use to define themselves. The word "gay" is, of course, as
fraught with political significance as, in the past, was
"black," which has long since supplanted "Negro" and
"colored" in most of the U.S. press. Like "black," "gay"
is a term that connotes pride. Moreover, as James Saslow,
New York editor of The Advocate, a nationally distributed
gay news magazine published in San Mateo, California,
explains: "The gay community uses the word 'gay' to get
away from the sexual connotations implicit in the word
'homosexual.' I see the resistance by the traditional press to
the use of the word 'gay' [as stemming from the fact that ] it
would force reporters to confront the nonsexual aspects of
coverage of gay rights and how our community has or-
ganized itself."
Gaps, lapses - blackouts
Papers that, in one way or another, close themselves off
from contact with on-staff gays and from their local gay
communities repeatedly incur the risk of missing out on
stories and of producing distorted coverage of stories they
do report. For example:
The 1980 presidential election marked the emergence ofgays as a political force on the national level. Some papers
took note of what syndicated columnists Jack W. Germond
and Jules Witcover described in a November 29, 1979,
piece as "the gay-rights movement's most ambitious project
yet . . . to elect homosexual delegates to the Democratic
and Republican national conventions next summer to ham-
mer through gay-rights platform planks." On June 25,
1980, for instance, The Minneapolis Tribune ran a story
headlined DEMOCRATIC PARTY ADOPTS GAY-RIGHTS PLANK;
on August 13 of that year The Washington Star and The
Washington Post ran articles on gay caucus activities at the
Democratic National Convention and followed up with
pieces on the nomination of gay activist Melvin Boozer as a
vice-presidential candidate. The New York Times, on the
other hand, did not mention the gay caucus or the nomina-
tion of an openly gay vice-presidential candidate until after
the convention - and then only in three paragraphs in an
August 16 "Reporter's Notebook" piece by Howell Raines
and in the last paragraph of a wire-service piece that ap-
peared the same day. (The Times's only mention of the
adoption by the Democratic Party of a gay-rights plank
which had the backing of then-President Carter, and which
marked the first time any major American political party had
adopted such a plank, was a single sentence in a long June
25, 1980, piece on the platform.)
On June 18, 1981, the U.S. House of Representatives
debated the so-called McDonald Amendment, which would
Protesting coverage: A CBS Reports documentary called
"GavPower, GayPolitics,"aired on April16, 1980, was criticized
not only by gays such as these shown in front of the CBS
Broadcast Center in New York City, but by the National News
Council. Ostensibly about the role gays play in San Francisco
politics, the documentary emphasized sadomasochism, public sex,
and drag queens. Harry Britt, the city's only openly
gam city and county supervisor. was not mentioned or seenMARCH. APRIL 1982
III--
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Pierson, Ransdell. [Photocopy of the Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1982], text, 1982-03/1982-04; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1954946/m1/11/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.