Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Saturday, Feb. 9, 2002

Four decades ago, media coverage of homosexuality was universally hostile. McGowan recalls Time magazine's description of homosexuality as a "pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life" deserving "no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste, and above all no pretence that it is anything but a pernicious sickness."

Straight News quoted Mike Wallace as calling the average homosexual "promiscuous" and "not interested in or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage." In 1974 the Los Angeles Times referred to homosexuals as "fags" on its front page.

McGowan notes that as late as the 1980s homosexual reporters were mistreated by their editors.

How times have changed. Big Media's commitment to increase the number of homosexual reporters and editors has succeeded to the point where at the New York Times alone, according to McGowan, "three of the [newspaper's] top political reporters, an advertising columnist, theater critic, film critic, architecture critic and classical music critic are all openly gay, along with the page-one picture editor and the top editor of its Sunday magazine . ...

"But the notion that the presence of more openly gay reporters in the newsroom has translated into more and better coverage of gay issues, is, I think, without foundation."

McGowan explains that the presence of homosexuals in the newsroom has "intensified the attention given to incidents where gays have been the victims of homophobia." He cites the widely-publicized case of Matthew Shepard, the gay Wyoming youth who "was lured from a bar by two thugs in the fall of 1998, beaten unconscious and left to die, tied to a fence post in sub-freezing temperatures.

"The implicit assumption of the coverage was that Shepard had fallen victim to the often invisible but always sinister homophobia embedded deeply in American society, a pathology that could only be cured by hate crimes legislation."

Frank Rich Blames Shepard Murder on Trent Lott

The Times' Frank Rich typified the hysterical reaction of pro-gay liberal columnists. He described the killing as an outrage "that happened against the backdrop of a campaign in which the far right, abetted by political leaders like Trent Lott, was demonizing gay people as sick and sinful."

Compare the avalanche of press coverage given to the Shepard case with the coverage concerning the murder of 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising and the trial of two homosexual neighbors who killed him. Commenting on the scanty coverage of that case, McGowan notes that "when homosexuals are the perpetrators of violence instead of the victims the sense of moral urgency seems to vanish."

The details of the Dirkhising case were incredibly gruesome, involving the very worst kind of homosexual behaviors - the boy was tied to a bed, had underwear shoved into his mouth, which was also covered with duct tape. "As one man stood in a doorway and masturbated, the other raped the boy for hours, using a variety of foreign objects, including food," McGowan reports. He was left to die slowly of suffocation.

Yet the coverage given to the case, compared with that given the Shepard murder, which was far less brutal and had no sexual overtones, was minuscule.

Leftist Media Cover Up Dirkhising Murder

McGowan did a Nexus search and learned that the Shepard case generated a massive 3,007 stories. "And when the case finally went to trial ... it was all over the broadcast news, received front-page coverage in all major newspapers, and was featured on the cover of Time magazine. (In all, the New York Times ran 195 stories about the case.)

"In the month after the Dirkhising murder, however, Nexus recorded only 46 stories. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, CNN, ABC, CBC and NBC ignored the story altogether and continued to do so through the March 2001 trial of one of the murderers which resulted in a conviction. (The other assailant later pled guilty)."

McGowan notes that the Washington Post ran "but one tiny AP item about the case, along with an unusual ombudsman's defensive explanation of the paper's decision not to cover the case."

While most of the major media found all sorts of excuses for their failure to cover the Dirkhising case when they had gone to extremes covering and overcovering the Shepard killing, the fact remains that, as McGowan puts it, the Dirkhising murder was simply "too hot to handle because it raised the explosive issue of gay pedophilia and because it threatened the sanctity of the gays-as-victims script which has attained the status of holy writ in the media."

One Brave Voice Explains the Hypocrisy

He sums up by quoting the surprisingly candid Andrew Sullivan - an openly gay columnist for the liberal New Republic.

Wrote Sullivan: "The Shepard case was hyped for political reasons: to build support for inclusion of homosexuals in a federal hate crimes law. The Dirkhising case was ignored for political reasons: squeamishness about reporting a story that could feed anti-gay prejudice and the lack of any pending legislation to hang a story on ... Some deaths - if they affect a politically protected class - are worth more than others. Other deaths, those that do not fit a politically correct profile, are left to oblivion."

This is more than mere "coloring of the news." It is outright dishonesty - propaganda disguised as reporting. And McGowan cites countless other instances where the pursuit of so-called "diversity" has turned journalists into mouthpieces for the homosexual agenda.

Next: feminism and "diversity"

Save $5 on William McGowan's eye-opening "Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism"

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