For years, Don Lemon has been a diamond in the rough at CNN. The dying cable news network, plagued by irrelevancy and low ratings for years, found a steadfast anchor with integrity in Lemon, who anchors a newscast and interviews newsmakers from CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta.
This summer, Lemon announced in a book that he is gay. In any other profession, that admission shouldn’t be problematic. However, for many journalists, coming out as a homosexual incites accusations of bias from traditionalist groups that refuse to accept America’s changing social mores. Neither Lemon nor any other gay journalist – I’m looking at you, Anderson Cooper – should deal with these problems any more than a black, Asian or Latino reporter should be accused of bias for the color of their skin.
Unfortunately, outside of Madison, the conversation about media’s responsibility to the public is largely regulated by “media watchdog groups.” If you watch Fox News or MSNBC, you’ll often see folks from the Media Research Center or Media Matters for America appear on the television set, spewing convenient figures about partisanship in the media that only serve to further polarize the national political discussion. So, naturally, the conservative watchdogs at the Media Research Center outside of Washington, DC have taken to singling out gay journalists like Lemon for being gay.
“Lemon has a history of pro-gay bias at CNN, featuring soft interviews of pro-gay figures and hinting that Christian churches preach the same hateful message against homosexuality that the fringe Westboro Baptist Church promotes – ‘God hates fags,'” the think tank reported earlier this year on its news analysis site, NewsBusters.
NewsBusters is chock-full of snide comments about how homosexuals wrongly dominate the news media – their most recent piece attacks celebrity blogger Perez Hilton for writing a “cute, uplifting children’s book and a slick piece of gay rights propaganda.”
The writers behind these pieces often appear on cable television, and their boss, MRC founder Brent Bozell, is often a featured guest on the Fox News Channel. These writers are not wingnuts backed into a rhetorical corner by a gay-dominated media. They’re considered credible voices in our political discourse.
This cannot continue.
Aside from the one-sided and counterproductive contributions watchdog organizations on both ends of the political spectrum make to the public’s understanding of the media, they also help the continuation of stereotypes. For liberal groups like Media Matters, this means assuming all conservatives are explosive blowhards like Sean Hannity. But conservative groups like the MRC are even worse. I noticed this when I read the comments about Perez Hilton.
“This is another person who’d I’d like to beat the tar out of; the assault charges would be worth it,” wrote rbosque in a comment on NewsBusters.
This is the kind of discourse many fringe conservative groups promote on their websites and on cable. Any journalist who doesn’t follow their strict set of anti-gay guidelines is condemned as a member of the “liberal media.”
But the balance of history has finally shifted to the side of gay advocates, and anti-gay advocates can no longer gain the momentum to shift that balance back to their interests. At the risk of sounding like an over-eager neo-hippie, this was the tone in the early sixties, so it must become the tone today.
My generation of student journalists has enough on its plate with the death of print and traditional journalism. It should be easy enough for us to decide that public figures like Rick Santorum obstruct rights in the same tradition of George Wallace and Strom Thurmond, and in 20 years the anti-gay lobby in this country will be reduced to irrelevancy.
If that’s a liberal bias, I don’t care. It’s time for journalists – whether they be as gay as Don Lemon or as straight as Tom Brokaw – to acknowledge that sexual orientation isn’t an indicator of bias. It’s a state of being.
Ryan Rainey ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in journalism and Latin American studies.
