LETTER FROM
THE EDITOR
and abandoned by the community they’ve been trying to protect.
“We risk our lives every day,” one
cop tells Rudolf. “And this is what
you get in return. See you later
and don’t let the door hit you on
the way out.” And while Camden’s
cops will be able to apply for the
new force, many say the approach
is flawed, since the Metro Division
plans to hire cops — at much lower
salaries — from outside New Jersey, which could enflame tensions
in already-simmering neighborhoods. As James Harris, president
of the New Jersey NAACP, put it:
“Do not eliminate the Camden Police Department. Find ways of improving it, but do not eliminate it.”
Elsewhere in the issue Michelangelo Signorile looks back at an
article he wrote 20 years ago for
The Advocate, “Out at The New
York Times: Gays, Lesbians, AIDS
and Homophobia Inside America’s
Newspaper of Record.” It began
with Signorile’s interview with the
paper’s assistant national editor
Jeff Schmalz, the first Times staffer
to come out as gay and reveal that
he had AIDS. Then Arthur Suzlberger, Jr. and top editors including
Max Frankel and Joseph Lelyveld
HUFFINGTON
12.09.12
spoke on the record, ending the
paper’s culture of silence on gay
issues and confronting its inadequate AIDS coverage.
This shift had reverberations
far beyond the paper’s offices. As
Signorile writes in his new in-
‘We risk our lives every
day,’ one cop tells Rudolf. ‘And
this is what you get in return.
See you later and don’t let the
door hit you on the way out.’”
troduction to the original article,
the paper’s “negligence on AIDS
early on had a detrimental effect
on bringing in-depth, life-saving
attention to an epidemic that had
been callously ignored by political leaders and sensationalized by
other media.” And confronting gay
issues actually helped propel the
paper to a new level of journalistic integrity: “The Times became a
leader on coverage of LGBT issues
as well as a leader among
media companies.”
ARIANNA