HUFFINGTON
12.09.12
OUT AT THE TIMES
“Their political and
Washington reporters
don’t ask the presidential
candidates — or even the
President — about gay
civil rights, about gays
in the military, or even
about AIDS,” he says.
“The international
coverage of gays is woeful. Their foreign correspondents are ignorant
and not educated on
gay issues. The pieces
on China’s repression,
for example, never talk
about the rounding up
of homosexuals. The articles on skinhead violence in Germany never
recount the horrible
antigay attacks.”
If you read only The
Times for coverage of
California’s protests
and rio ting over Gov.
Pete Wilson’s veto of
a measure that would
have banned antigay
employment discrimination, you didn’t find
out until six weeks after
the demonstrations began that the daily protests by lesbians and
gays marked a turning
point in the gay civil
rights movement. Actually, you didn’t even
know they occurred
until a week after they
began, when The Times
finally decided to run an
Associated Press photo
and a blurb. The Times’s
Los Angeles correspondent, Robert Reinhold,
after writing one piece
at the outset about the
politics behind the veto
(which landed on page
A16), seemed to fall
asleep at the wheel.
“I don’t really cover
demonstrations,” Reinhold explains. “As I
recall, I did tell them to
pick it up on the wires.
The [broad story that
was written six weeks
later] would have been
done earlier had I not
gotten involved in other
things. We’re spread
pretty thin here. But I
think there was some
advantage to the delay,
to see whether the anger that had been stirred
by the veto was more
enduring and more substantive than just a few
protests.” By contrast,
starting the day after
the protests began, USA
Today had the story on
page 1A, 2A or 3A every
day for a full week as
well as on the editorial
and op-ed pages.
When it comes to
physical contact between homosexuals, The
Times is still squeamish.
Last year, assistant managing editor Allan M.
Siegal removed from an
article a photo of two
women kissing on the
television series L.A.
Law. (Ironically, it was
to accompany an article
by television critic John
J. O’Connor about how
television makes gays
invisible.) Siegal, The
Times’s resident monitor
of taste, also caused an
uproar among gays at the
paper last year when he
pulled a photo of a Connecticut lawmaker kissing his male lover (as a
public act of coming out)
during a session of the