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 n Bentonville,
Arkansas yesterday, a jury sent Joshua Macabe Brown, 23, to jail
for a very long time. On
September
26, 1999, Brown and his gay lover, Davis Don Carpenter, 39, were
responsible for the grisly death of 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising.
The thin, longhaired boy was bound, gagged with underwear in his
mouth, blindfolded, taped to the bed, drugged, and sodomized by
Brown while Carpenter watched.
This lurid assault on a child should have inflamed the tabloid glands
of all the TV magazine shows. It screamed 60-minute Dateline/Court
TV exclusive. It was JonBenet Ramsey without any of the confounding
uncertainty. If Jesse Dirkhising has been shot at school, he would
have been famous. If he had been a gay teenager and his attackers
were "homophobic," he would have made Matthew Shepard pale by comparison.
But every element of the Dirkhising case — through death, arraignment,
trial, and conviction (and no doubt during Carpenter's trial to
follow) — the national media have failed to fulfill their usual
role as wailing, oh-the-humanity, breast-beaters who take a lurid
crime and seek to explore what's wrong with America that this could
happen here.
In today's Washington Times, Robert Stacy McCain quotes the
usual network spokesmen with their old we only have 22 minutes of
evening news to fill a day, which seems to exclude two hours of
daily morning shows (three if you're NBC), hours and hours of Datelines
and 20/20s and Nightlines. (Fox did have Bret Baier
report on the story in 1999, and then again during the trial.) ABC
spokesman Todd Polkes summarized what CNN boss Jamie Kellner calls
the "middle-of-the-road" media attitude perfectly: "It appears to
be a local crime story that does not raise the kind of issues that
would warrant our coverage."
Matthew Shepard's murder in 1998 in Wyoming was also a local crime
story, but using the Polkes Principle, it certainly did "raise the
kind of issues" that the networks wanted raised: A nation stained
by its intolerance and hatred for homosexuals. As Time.com's Jonathan
Gregg argued in 1999: "The reason the Dirkhising story received
so little play is because it offered no lessons. There is no lesson
here, no moral of tolerance, no hope to be gleaned in the punishment
of the perpetrators." There's no hope in punishment? There's no
lesson for parents in how to protect their children from this fate?
So why, other than a liberal media's pro-gay sensibilities, would
the camera crews descend on masse in Laramie but not on Rogers,
Arkansas, where Jesse Dirkhising suffocated to death while his assailant
had a sandwich? The national media could easily point to the Associated
Press, which underlined and flagged the Shepard beating on its national
wire for everyone to see. By contrast, the Dirkhising murder was
never put on the national wire, and its local dispatches were 200-word
local-crime-beat yawners that never described Brown and Carpenter
as gay men.
But the Dirkhising case is the omission that proves the rule of
gay media activism over liberal media outlets. When the Washington
Times first brought the Dirkhising story to national attention,
David Smith, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, was telling
the establishment that there was no human-rights angle to the Dirkhising
story. "This has nothing to do with gay people," he claimed, as
if the moon were made of green cheese. This is the same group which
pulled the udders raw on the Matthew Shepard story for its own enrichment,
and they did it by wildly claiming that Shepard was murdered by
a newspaper ad telling gays that Jesus Christ could change their
hearts. No one in the media insisted on accuracy, civility, or a
need to "change the tone of Washington." They promoted the HRC line
with fervor.
Contrarian Andrew Sullivan came to the discrepancy this week in
The New Republic, claiming that "in the month after Shepard's
murder, Nexis recorded 3,007 stories about his death. In the month
after Dirkhising's murder, Nexis recorded 46 stories about his."
But those 46 were largely contained to what Sullivan dismissed as
"rabid-right" outlets.
The Dirkhising omission is inspired by the attitude the Gay and
Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) seeks to enforce in
the newsrooms. She announced that activists must "convince them
that there is no other side to these issues…. We are now in
the position of being able to say, we have the high ground, we have
the facts, and we don't have to go one-on-one with these people."
That would include "these people" who wonder why Jesse Dirkhising
is still a nobody.
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