GLAADly Ignored
The omission that proves the rule of gay media activism.

By Tim Graham, White House correspondent for World magazine
March 23, 2001 12:45 p.m.

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.