Presswatch / Off the Straight and Narrow
Cony, John
B eware when the press plows new moral ground. Homosexuality is now all over page one and the evening news, although reasonable people may find that stories about it are suspect. "Don't ask, don't...
...Serious people may be bemused by much of this...
...It may seem inappropriate to pick on "60 Minutes" twice in one column, but as much as anything on television, its little mini-movies are paradigms of media thinking...
...Jim, his back to the camera, said thatthe FBI had recruited women and blacks, but not gays, which clearly displeased Mike Wallace...
...I71...
...Moreover, nearly half the 102 assault cases had involved child molestation...
...Last spring, for example, the reputable Battelle Human Affairs Research Center in Seattle released a survey that found that only 1.1 percent of American males described themselves as exclusively homosexual, while only 2 percent reported a homosexual experience in the last decade...
...Unfortunately, though, the New York Times has embraced the new canon...
...Indeed, all European NATO countries except Britain have conscription, and their armies must accept homosexuals whether they want to or not...
...As a captain in 1983, he waved his service pistol at three Israeli tanks that tried to force their way into an American-controlled area in Beirut and stopped them in their tracks...
...Or, Sam Nunn and the Senate Armed Services Committee visited the naval base at Norfolk, Virginia„ and found that most of the sailors did not want homosexuals as shipmates...
...Alfred Kinsey's old estimate of 10 percent...
...If it were, the media attention focused on homosexuals might seem excessive, and only a homophobe would want that...
...When the media report on homosexuality they do so with one eye closed, as if fearful of finding something unpleasant...
...NBC also reported quite cheerfully on the growing spate of androgynous ads...
...Macho, Tough and Gay," a report on "60 Minutes," was typical...
...Media vagaries are divorced from real life...
...There are days when the Times seems to be edited by ACT-UP and Larry Kramer...
...They included six male soldiers, one of them a West Point graduate who took part in what army investigators called a "sex ring" in occupied Iraq...
...In fact, the test is not always that subtle, and on occasion its guidelines stand out in sharp relief...
...Within weeks of the publication of Battelle's finding, Newsweek did a cover story on lesbians...
...Only the Washington Times interviewed Major Charles B. Johnson, who had written to the commandant of the Marine Corps: "The new interim policy on homosexuals serving in the military constitutes an illegal order...
...Overwhelmingly, though, Powell's reception was favorable...
...W hick- leaves us with, among other things, the coverage by America's most prestigious newspaper...
...His picture was on front pages...
...Granted, too, that the editorial page has become less interested in persuading readers about the correctness of its positions than in finding new ways to have tantrums...
...Thus the coverage of gays in the military...
...The Times's editorial page was so overcome by all this that it made him the subject of an editorial...
...Kinsey's discredited estimate—actually, Kinsey admitted he was never sure himself—NBC's "Nightly News" reported on gay purchasing power...
...These will be capricious deaths that won't accomplish anything, and that makes them illegal...
...Better to have a television correspondent chat up a Dutch officer or a newspaper reporter chase after a colonel's son...
...The thinking here may seem baffling, although discerning readers can find clues...
...Homosexuals in the Dutch army have their own union...
...One can put up with all that, but it is disturbing to find the news columns bent out of shape...
...Colin Powell, for instance, delivered the commencement address at Harvard, and a small number of gay activists turned their backs...
...It said gays spent $514 billion a year and lesbians preferred Toyotas over all other cars, while among male homosexuals Toyota was number two...
...The Washington Times, using documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, also reported that the army prosecuted at least sixteen soldiers for lesbian or homosexual activity during the Gulf War...
...Nightline" and the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour," both of which ordinarily enjoy windy discussions of gay issues, ignored it, too...
...Times stories, though, did not mention that...
...NBC might have ignored the Battelle figures as irrelevant or unscientific, but on some matters, it could be precise...
...To change the policy is not only stupid, it is illegal," he said of the president's proposal...
...The 1.1 percent figure could not possibly be correct...
...G ive the media all the best of it, and say that, because Major Johnson was only expressing an opinion, they were not obligated to report it...
...It also introduced us to a gay FBI agent identified only as "Jim...
...Androgyny, you must understand, is acceptable, and perhaps even preferable, in the new moral canon...
...Stories are shaped accordingly...
...On the other hand, by media standards, the estimate was quite reasonable...
...So much for all the witch hunts...
...The lieutenant colonel might call a strike if he is passed over for full colonel...
...It did not matter...
...It will cause unnecessary deaths in combat of soldiers, sailors, and airmen...
...Macho, Tough and Gay"—it sounded like an ad for a leather bar—focused on a lieutenant colonel in the Dutch army who, according to "60 Minutes," got along well with his men, and fully expected to rise in rank despite his homosexuality...
...The page-one story in the Times, however, led with what might have been the only petty officer at the base who said he couldn't care less...
...When Bill Clinton made his first dreamy pronouncement about lifting the ban on gays, television did a number of stories about homosexuality in other armies...
...Suggestions by "60 Minutes" to the contrary, the Dutch experience is not applicable to the United States...
...Later Major Johnson served in the Gulf War...
...The gay lieutenant colonel may get along with his men because he and they do not share quarters...
...He asked Jim how many FBI agents were in the closet, and Jim said about one out of ten...
...About the same proportion as in society," Wallace said smoothly, and raised the Battelle figure by a factor of ten...
...Indeed, it seems to want to expand it...
...It centered on a former New York police officer who has found life more enjoyable in San Francisco...
...The same week that "60 Minutes" was reaffirming Dr...
...ABC's "World News Tonight" dismissed the finding with a single skeptical sentence, while NBC's "Nightly News" ignored it...
...When Marine Colonel Fred Peck, who opposed lifting the ban on homosexuals in the military, told the Senate he would fear for the life of his gay son if the young man joined the armed services, the Times buried his testimony in the last two paragraphs of the jump on a page-one story...
...Apparently, the Times had decided that those terms were derisive, but that "gay loving" was not...
...Newsweek did not disclose who had counted the lesbians, although the 5 percent figure, raising the Battelle figure by a factor of four or five, was clearly its own...
...it really has been quite terrible...
...Nonetheless, the figure was consistent with similar studies here and in Europe, none ofwhich had ever come close to confirming Dr...
...Then it corrected its mistake...
...It is hard to think of him as anything other than principled, and in an interview with Michael Hedges he got down to what had escaped most of the media...
...Instead they said that Campbell had called Clinton a "dope smoking," "skirt chasing," "draft dodging" commanderin-chief...
...I therefore tender my resignation at the government's earliest convenience...
...The Canadian army is smaller than the Metropolitan Toronto police force, and, as the Toronto Globe and Mail has glumly reported, it has 'more generals than tanks-130 to 113—and no one expects it ever to go to war...
...The Netherlands does not have much of an army, and the entire Dutch military establishment will be reduced to only 39,000 when conscription ends in five years...
...The study found that eight of every ten homosexuals the army had court-martialed for sexual misconduct in the previous four years had been involved in a sexual assault...
...On gay issues, most of big media does this, too...
...A week later, the young man turned up in the Times again, this time on page one...
...Homosexuality must be seen as widespread, healthy, and even endearing, and to see it as anything else is to violate the new moral canon...
...In a tattle-tale mood, he even confided to Ed Bradley that he knew of gay generals in the United States Army...
...Nonetheless, he may be right when he says he expects a promotion...
...He said homosexuals were just like everyone else, and that the ban should be lifted on gays in the military...
...Major Johnson is an interesting man...
...Don't ask, don't tell" applies to the new journalistic rules as well as to a prescription for gays in the military...
...We are witnessing the neutering of journalism, with nothing substantive to replace it...
...The matter of gays in the military, though, is really too important for either vagaries or the new canon...
...Meanwhile, "60 Minutes" also neglected to mention that most Dutch troops live at home, and barracks life is limited...
...Obviously, some statistics about homosexuals are more acceptable than others...
...They know if they make homosexuality a bar to military service, large numbers of draftees will announce they are gay as soon as they receive their induction notices...
...Canada and Europe's NATO countries were usually cited...
...It said there were "2 to 3 million of them in the United States—,far fewer than the approximately 5 percent of the population represented by gay men...
...America's premier newspaper has been stacking the deck...
...This is all terribly unattractive, of course, and has no place in the new canon...
...The Times can find unlimited space for Colonel Peck's son and any number of closeted, unidentified gays, but it averts its eyes from those it disagrees with...
...Moreover, he has a Ph.D...
...It is harder, though, to excuse the inattention to facts...
...Despite all the attention being paid to gays in the military and the lamentations about witch hunts, the Washington Times seemed to be the only newspaper to report on a study of courts martial by the Army's judge advocate general...
...in policy analysis, and when he offered his resignation, he was only three years away from a pension...
...The Canadian experience is not either, even though it was so often cited...
...It had applied the ACT-UP and Larry Kramer test...
...Just before Newsweek was on the newsstands, "60 Minutes" did a report called "Gay Cops...
...Journalism allows room for maneuver, and reporters and editors are allowed to make choices...
...Two days later it carried another story—not about Colonel Peck, of course, but about the son, a student at the University of Maryland, and how he had felt about disclosing his homosexuality to his father...
...Nonetheless, the report was distinguished more by what it left out than by what it included...
...The Times story noted this in the first paragraph, but the rest of the story solicited the views of the activists...
...Other news organizations, for example, noted that Major General Harold Campbell, who was forced to retire from the Air Force for making disparaging remarks about Bill Clinton, had termed the president "gay loving...
...Granted that literate adults do not read the "Styles" section...
...The aggressively trendy—and increasingly incomprehensible—Sunday "Styles" section appears determined tolegitimize all aberrant lifestyles, while the editorial page sees homophobia, sexism, or racism at the root of most problems...
Vol. 26 • September 1993 • No. 9
