Subject: Louisville Editor Responds to Criticisms
From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 1997 15:53:53 -0400 (EDT)

Following is a response by the editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal to
recent concerns in the gay and lesbian community about an article the
newspaper had sliced substantially.  The original AP report--on a speech by
Pres. Clinton on hate crimes--included several paragraphs on gay and lesbian
hate crimes, but the Courier-Journal edited out all of those paragraphs.

What was lost in the entire debate was not the specific editing job itself.
 If it was an isolated occurrence at that newspaper, it might not have become
so noteworthy.  After all, editorially, the Louisville Courier-journal has
been very supportive of the gay community.  But the news department, which is
separate, needs some work.

My original posting indicated that this was only the latest in a long series
of such sins of omissions:  that there was a definite pattern of
systematically excluding national gay and lesbian news from its pages.  I've
been documenting that problem for at least eleven years now, and sometimes
calling the paper on it when it became particularly blatant, but the problem
persists.

David Williams
Louisville

********************

INTEMPERATE LETTERS ABOUT HATE
Louisville Courier-Journal, July 16, 1997

By David Hawpe

  You never know what is going to cause a furor.
  Last month, President Clinton used his weekly radio address to condemn
bigotry, announce a Justice Department review of hate crime laws, and promise
a White House conference on such issues.
  Following usual procedure, our wire desk shortened the Associated Press
story from 12 paragraphs to six.  We often must edit, in order to fit stories
into available space.
  The next thing you know, The Courier-Journal is being targeted by the gay
press for a write-in campaign.
  The headline in one publication, Southern Voice, charged, "NEWSPAPER ERASES
SEXUAL ORIENTATION FROM CLINTON SPEECH."  The accompanying story cited two
paragraphs that were removed, and asked readers to contact me, helpfully
providing my post office box, fax number, and e-mail address.  Here are the
two missing paragraphs:
  "[President Clinton] pointed to several recent incidents:  a midnight spray
of gunfire on the new home of a black family moving into a predominently
white Atlanta suburb; the beating of a homosexual Washington man by attackers
shouting anti-gay epithets; and the bombing of a Jewish student's Los Angeles
dormitory room, where vandals drew a swastika near the door.
  "At a time when violent crime generally is on the decline, the Human Rights
Campaign, an organization of male homosexuals and lesbians, cites FBI
statistics showing a 42 percent rise in reported hate crimes from 1991 to
1995.  Almost 13 percent of the incidents were based on sexual orientation."
  Some of the letters that showed up when we dropped these paragraphs out
were pretty hateful, too.
  University of Kentucky philosophy professor Joan Callahan demanded, "Why in
the world would you do such a thing?"  She added, "Your editorial choices
certainly suggest that The Courier-Journal's position is that hate crimes
against sexual minorities are less important than hate crimes against other
minorities."
  I object.  If we erred, we were inclusive about it.  We cut the whole
paragraph that contained the President's specific examples, including those
involving race and religion.
  Actually, as a long-time staffer at a newspaper that routinely gets accused
of slavish, unthinking support for the gay agenda, I found it refreshing to
be accused of something different.
  Patrick Paris of Louisville wrote to say, "While I understand that AP
stories are often cut in the interest of space, I cannot possibly understand
how you can justify withholding this important and major part of the
President's speech."
  He added, "Violent crimes against minorities, particularly gays and
lesbians, are horrible and disgusting, and as shown by these statistics are
nationally on the rise.  Your gross misinformation of the public belittles
the scale of these crimes, and makes you just as guilty as those who continue
to perpetuate this violence against the gay community."
  Readers can decide for themselves whether violent crimes are more horrible
and disgusting when committed against gays and lesbians, as opposed to racial
and religious minorities.  But I can predict the view of those who survived
the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party, concerning the "particularity" Mr. Paris
asserts.
  Clearly our editing did not produce any "gross misinformation," did not
"belittle the scale" of anything, and did not justify jailing our wire desk
along with those who roll homosexuals for fun.
  Local gay activisits ought to save their stationery for letters in support
of the fairness ordinance, which doesn't seem much closer to passage now than
it did the last time around.
  Or they might write to the author of a piece in this week's Economist
magazine, who tells readers that in enlightened parts of nations like ours,
"the first members of a unique new clas are emerging:  young gay people
(those who came of age after the late 1980s) who have almost never feared
abuse or assault; to whom coming out is a relatively easy rite of passage
rather than a step over a cliff, and to whom AIDS means not the terrifying
deaths of friends and the hate of puritans, but the same thing it means to
their straight contemporaries:  merely the need to use annoying bits of
rubber during sex.  They [the Economist author is among them] are the front
edge of a generation that might be called 'post-gay':  one that may grow up
wondering what all the fuss was about."
  Somebody warn Frank Simon.
  Meanwhile, to further prove that you can't slip any easy categories over
whole groups of people, let me tell you about another letter we got, on the
issue of our editing the AP story.
  Warren Taylor wrote from Atlanta to say, "I am on your side."  Here is his
take:
  "As a conservative, libertarian, homosexual male, I can find nothing wrong
with your paper's decision to run the story as you did.  There is no
indication that you distorted any facts; you merely reported that Mr. Clinton
outlined a plan for combating hate crime without going into the minutiae.
 This, of course, is of no consequence to the reporters and editors of
Southern Voice.  Your reportage did not comply with their notion of political
correctness and therefore became subject to their censure.  Please know that
the militant activists in the gay rights movement hardly speak for all
homosexuals.  In fact, I do not even describe myself as 'gay' any more since
that word no longer refers just to sexual preference but also includes the
activitists' political agenda.  While I concur with many of the goals of the
movement, I cannot wholeheartedly embrace an agenda that has given us such
oddities as 'lesbian poetry,' 'gay music' or 'queer theory' and deems
homosexuality to be merely another biological variation such as skin, hair or
eye color.
  "Count this," he concluded, "as a letter from one homosexual who still
believes in freedom of the press and has little in common with the thought
police who claim to represent me solely on the basis of a shared sexuality."

END