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Diversity
Ten years later, survey finds progress, failings
Followup to landmark 1990 study of gays and lesbians
in newsrooms can be read as an indictment of the press, but a close look
shows a glass that is half full
By Loren Ghiglione
In 1989-90 Loren Ghiglione served as president of the American Society
of Newspaper Editors and initiated the first survey of gays and lesbians
in newsrooms.
Lesbians and Gays in the Newsroom: 10 Years Later, the recent updating
of Roy Aarons’ landmark 1990 study for ASNE, can be read as an indictment.
Only 48 percent of those surveyed rate coverage of gays and lesbians as
good-to-excellent, compared to an 84 percent good-to-excellent rating for
their news organizations’ coverage of all subjects.
Derogatory comments are still heard in newsrooms “at a surprisingly
high rate.” Less than half of news organizations offer same-sex partner
health benefits. Discussion between newsroom managers and gay and lesbian
staffers about coverage of gay and lesbian issues has leveled or slid backward.
The study also can be read as an indictment of U.S. journalism in general.
For example, many American media have reduced their coverage of major news
from abroad. So coverage of HIV/AIDS, which is killing millions in the
Third World, is less adequately reported today.
And the media’s emphasis on conflict and shocking, outer-edge extremes
— gay-bashing and hate crimes — has ignored the growth of gay-straight
alliances in schools, corporate America’s progress and gay-straight reconciliation
in churches and athletics. “What’s not being told,” Aarons says, “is what
happens in the great middle.”
The study also can be read as an indictment of continuing racism in
newsrooms and news coverage as well as in society. The study says coverage
of “lesbians and gays of color is rated at the very lowest level.” (Another
recent study by Av Westin says closet racism remains virulent in TV news
decisions about coverage and that, under pressure from advertisers, local
station managers quietly kill investigative pieces involving race and other
tough topics.)
Another aspect of the indictment: The press relies too heavily on easier-to-report,
easier-on-the-newsroom-budget story lines that are safe and simplistic
— hero vs. heel, good vs. bad, life vs. death.
And, as Geoffrey Cowan, dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication,
notes in his introductory note to the study, “the news media, with some
notable exceptions, have become less interested in hard news and more obsessed
with scandal, celebrity and ‘news you can use.’ ” Cowan asks, “Why
should we expect more than a few outstanding media outlets to give serious
coverage to sexual orientation issues that require enterprise reporting?”
The glass is half full
Despite those indictments, all valid, I also like to see the latest
survey as a glass-is-half-full tribute to ten years of achievement by Aarons,
the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and a large number
of news organizations, many of them ASNE members.
A decade ago, the vast majority of gay and lesbian journalists were
in the closet. Only 13 percent of those surveyed were willing to be quoted
by name. NLGJA, which today has more than 1,000 members in 24 chapters,
was not yet born. No daily newspaper offered same-sex partner health benefits.
And, as ASNE president in 1989-90, I could write a column asking whether
homophobia was the last acceptable form of discrimination among so-called
acceptable Americans, including editors. Today homophobia, for the
most part, is no longer acceptable. Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan
may want to shove gays and lesbians, mouths taped shut, back into the closet
— he recently called homosexuality “the love that will not shut up” — but
most Americans no longer tie gays and lesbians, as does Buchanan, to “social
decadence and national decline.”
Covering ‘The Other’
Yet troubling forms of discrimination remain, from ageism, to lookism
to jingoism. And those forms of discrimination ask us to continue casting
a critical eye at our coverage.
I would modify the call of Robert Dodge, NLGJA president, for the latest
survey to help the news industry “re-examine ways to improve gay and lesbian
coverage in the years ahead.” I hope the survey will encourage news
organizations to reexamine coverage not only of gays and lesbians but also
of all individuals seen as The Other.
That is, people thought of as mentally, not just physically, different,
or different because they are old or overweight, or because they live in
Africa, not America, or because they recently arrived in the United States
to live and work, or because they are imprisoned, or because they are labeled
atheists or Christian conservatives, or because they work as prison guards
or garbage collectors.
The Other should not be dismissed as a few individuals unworthy of our
concern. Foreign-born workers, for example, are not a housekeeper here,
a day laborer there, but 15.7 million people, 12 percent of the U.S. workforce.
Ten million people — including two million incarcerated — are under the
supervision of the criminal justice system. Tens of millions are
depressed or otherwise mentally ill. The Other is us.
Reducing stigma
News organizations and ASNE can do much more to reduce stigma and improve
coverage of The Other. For example, ASNE could re-establish its disabilities
committee. It could rewrite its mission statement on diversity to
mention mental ability as well as physical ability. It could use
its conventions to focus on the powerful ways the public and press ignore,
even stigmatize, people and transform them into The Other.
One of the “secrets” in Anthony Summers’ recently published “The Arrogance
of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon” is that Nixon’s psychotherapist,
Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker, visited the White House and, to avoid the charge
the president was mentally ill, lied about his destination when he signed
in and lied about why Nixon was seeing him.
Hutschnecker said: “It is safer for a politician to go to a whorehouse
than to see a psychiatrist.” Nixon, as if to prove Hutschnecker’s point,
publicly decried psychiatry.
Even today, decades later, politicians and plain folk alike feel compelled
to hide their mental difficulties. The point is not to cover mental illness
as if, say, schizophrenia is no different than a physical illness like
high blood pressure. But it is to address honestly the topic of mental
illness and to avoid reporting that sensationalizes and stigmatizes.
Another stigmatized group, prisoners, are used by everyone. They
battle our deadly forest fires, reportedly at wages that average $1 an
hour. Their videotaped confessions, thanks to Court TV, become
our evening TV-show entertainment. And politicians use inmates’ isolation
in jails and prisons with few rehabilitation or education programs to reassure
us that tough-on-crime, throw-away-the-key policies best serve the society.
But more and better reporting, like Margaret Talbot’s recent New York Times
Magazine article, “The Maximum Security Adolescent,” may remind us that
the prisoners being used and stigmatized are our children, our parents,
ourselves.
Three Roman Catholic bishops recently returned from the Great Lakes
region of eastern and central Africa to assess the plight of some two million
refugees. One of the three, Thomas G. Wenski, auxiliary bishop of
Miami, concluded: “This seems to be like a very large region of the world
that people are willing to let fall off the map.” Could it be that
the willing people are a reflection of a press willing to let coverage
of major segments of our population —from refugees to foreign-born workers
to prisoners — fall off the map? As a pie-in-the-sky Pollyanna,
I prefer to believe otherwise.
Ghiglione directs the School of Journalism at the University of Southern
California’s Annenberg School for Communication.
