Gray Lady Down (29 page)

The subject of gay marriage is what has most galvanized the
Times,
so much so that Daniel Okrent as public editor went hard on the paper for its skewed coverage. In the
Times,
he had learned “where gay couples go to celebrate their marriages; I’ve met gay
couples picking out bridal dresses; I’ve been introduced to couples who have been together for decades and have now sanctified their vows in Canada, couples who have successfully integrated the world of competitive ballroom dancing, couples whose lives are the platonic model of suburban stability.” While every one of these articles was legitimate, Okrent said, it was “disappointing to see The Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading.”

For example, Clifford Krauss implicitly drew a parallel to racial integration when he reported in 2003 on the flow of gay couples to Canada to get married, following in the footsteps of escaped slaves. When gay marriage was legalized by court order in Massachusetts in 2004, Pam Belluck and Kate Zezima’s report summed up the excitement in the gay community: “With the failure of last-ditch efforts . . . to reverse a court order legalizing same-sex marriage, starting on Monday (as early as 12.01 a.m. in Cambridge), thousands of gay couples will seal their relationships with a stamp of official recognition that many had never dreamed possible.”

Other localities that began to permit gay marriage in early 2004 received saturation coverage, and advocates were allowed to use the
Times
as megaphone, unfiltered and with minimal counterbalance. When Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco began issuing gay marriage licenses on February 12, 2004—in defiance of a California law passed by popular initiative in 2000—the ink flowed prodigally at the
Times.
Dean Murphy gave Newsom a spacious platform to explain, with considerable self-flattery, the genesis of his position. “Most politicians don’t get away with doing the right thing at a time when society is not necessarily unanimously ready for that,” Newsom said. “I did it because I thought it was right.” As for conservative critics, Newsom told Murphy that he wore their enmity as “a code of distinction.” He continued: “I have been befuddled by conservatives who talk about taking away rights, yet they claim to be conservatives. The hypocrisy to me is extraordinarily grand.” (Even some fellow Democrats, however, criticized Newsom for performing “spectacle weddings,” as Barney Frank put it.)

When the experiment was ended by order of the California Supreme Court on March 11, Murphy’s report dripped with pathos. Several couples waiting at City Hall for appointments to receive licenses were turned away, some of them in tears. “They were heartbroken,” said the county clerk, Nancy Alfaro. “It was very sudden.”

Around the same time, in late February, gay marriages started being performed officially in New Paltz, New York, hitherto known mainly for its college and for being the weekend home of Arthur Sulzberger Jr. The
Times
gave several glowing profiles to Jason West, the 26-year-old mayor who launched the experiment. In “Mayor Wedding Gay Couples Has History of Activism,” Thomas Crampton wrote, “At age 6, his father says, he refused to eat McDonald’s food because of environmental concerns about plastic-foam containers. At age 17, he declined all Christmas presents, to protest commercialization of the holiday.” After the first set of weddings, which involved twenty-five couples, Mayor West told Crampton, “I am willing to go to jail to hold these marriages,” and added, “This is a stand any decent American should take.”

Some of the weddings received cloying coverage. “Rushing Out of the Closet and Down the Aisle” described a retired U.S. Army major who was marrying a Dutch-born “sometime designer of haute couture accessories for pets.” The two had wanted more time to plan but decided that seizing the opportunity was wise. The Dutchman called his wedding day “the greatest day of his life.” He was grateful “to Mayor Jason West for permitting me to make a public declaration of my love for Jeff. Jeff and I sat down in the front of the bus for the first time and began a new phase of our lives together.”

A
Times
editorial of March 7 cheered local officials such as Mayor Newsom and Mayor West for pushing the next step in civil rights:

The editorial maintained that “Testing the law is a civil rights tradition: Jim Crow laws were undone by blacks who refused to obey them.”

In July 2006, New York State’s highest court ruled against gay marriage, rejecting the comparison with antimiscegenation laws and declaring that the state had a legitimate interest in protecting children. “Intuition and experience suggest that a child benefits from having before his or her eyes, every day, living models of what both a man and a woman are like,” the judges said, which meant that the state had a legitimate interest in promoting heterosexual marriages over same-sex ones. The
Times
was livid. A gay reporter, Patrick Healy, wrote in a front-page account:

An editorial, “Gay Marriage Setback,” took a whip to the court, accusing it of harming both the constitutional guarantee of equal protection and its reputation as a guardian of individual liberties. The argument that “children benefit from being raised by two natural parents” was, the
Times
claimed, “without hard evidence.” The editorial applauded a dissent by one particularly liberal judge,
Judith Kaye, especially her contention that future generations would “look upon barring gay marriage as akin to the laws that once barred interracial marriage.”

The paper’s “implicit advocacy,” as Daniel Okrent called it, was also underscored by how it characterized the opposition as repressed and unsophisticated homophobes. There was one notable exception: Peter Steinfels, who wrote in his column that the concern about moral values was not “a disguise for ignorance, irrationality and intolerance.” Whatever one may think about same-sex marriage, he pointed out, “it takes a real stretch to pretend that it is not a noteworthy departure from existing social and legal norms.” But for the most part, the
Times
dismissed all opposition as bigotry and hatred, and assumed that the granting of same-sex marriage privileges was inevitable.

When the California Supreme Court, in May 2008, overturned the law passed in 2000 stating that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California,” the
Times
extolled a new wave of court-sanctioned gay marriage. Patricia Leigh Brown’s report in mid June, “California Braces for ‘New Summer of Love,’” was illustrated with a picture of two lesbians who had been together for 49 years walking on a beach. Brown noted that California, unlike Massachusetts, did not limit marriage licenses to residents of the state, thus resurrecting old postcard images of California as the “Promised Land.” According to this report, California businesses in a wilted economy were welcoming the wanna-be marrieds with open arms. The
Times
used its website powers to solicit stories, photos and video from readers who were heading to California, and then produced a series of multimedia offerings about these California nuptials. A
Times
food writer, Kim Severson, wrote about her own plans to get married in California, as well as the boon to catering businesses.

Meanwhile, California residents quickly gathered signatures to put a new proposition on the ballot, this one to write the language of the earlier measure into the state’s constitution. Voters passed Proposition 8 in November 2008, and the
Times
decried the outcome as the “tyranny” of the majority over the minority. An editorial blamed “right-wing forces led by the Mormon Church,”
which had “poured tens of millions of dollars into the campaign” for “a measure to enshrine bigotry in the state’s Constitution.” When the California Supreme Court upheld the constitutional amendment in May 2009, a
Times
editorial called the decision “an affront to gay men and lesbians and to fundamental values enshrined in the state Constitution.” In addition to denying basic fairness to gay people, the editorial claimed, the court’s 6-1 ruling set an unfortunate legal precedent “that could allow the existing rights of any targeted minority to be diminished using the Election Day initiative process.”

What distinguished the
Times’
coverage of this round in the California gay marriage saga were the stories omitted as much as the ones reported. Supporters of Proposition 8 had predicted that the legalization of gay marriage might lead to the teaching of gay marriage in the schools. In fact, a group of San Francisco first graders were present at City Hall when their teacher was married, in a ceremony presided over by Gavin Newsom himself—who reportedly was less than pleased to see the kids there. In Hay-ward, California, five-year-olds were asked to sign pledge cards promising their support to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. As one Prop 8 organizer noted in the
Wall Street Journal,
not only could these kindergartners barely sign their names to the cards, but many had Spanish-speaking parents who needed to have the cards translated before they realized what their kids had signed. These stories of young children being used in this campaign triggered outrage, but did not appear in the
Times.

The
Times
did report on how Proposition 8 had stirred up a “new wave of activists,” which someone dubbed “Stonewall 2.0.” It also reported that some supporters of Prop 8, particularly in the arts, lost their jobs after disclosure laws exposed them to retaliation; that others were intimidated in their homes, courtesy of maps put out on the Web; and that some supporters and donors were sent envelopes containing white powder in the mail. But some of the physical harassment that activists employed against Prop 8 supporters—stomping on signs, attacking elderly people, vandalizing a Catholic Church wrongly assumed to have supported the initiative—apparently wasn’t news fit to print. And the editorial
page, which might have weighed in for freedom of speech, was silent.

When a federal appeals court judge overturned Proposition 8 on equal protection grounds in August 2010, the
Times
editorialized that this decision was “a stirring and eloquently reasoned denunciation of all forms of irrational discrimination, the latest link in a chain of pathbreaking decisions that permitted interracial marriages and decriminalized gay sex between consenting adults.”

On March 29, 2010, the
New York Times Magazine
featured a cover photo of two really cute white bunny rabbits, along with the question “Can Animals Be Gay?” The story inside led with a discussion of the discovery that one-third of Laysan albatrosses, a downy seabird that breeds on the northwestern tip of Oahu, Hawaii, raise their offspring in same-sex pairings. According to the author, Jon Mooallem, “The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody’s nose for what you might call ‘straight’ couples.” The piece exhibited a certain self-awareness. Mooallem wrote that when the discovery was first disclosed in a scientific journal, some news stories praised the research while others called it “pure propaganda and selective science at its dumbest” that was intended to “further an agenda.”

Animal stories have been a staple of American journalism forever, whether in tabloids, on TV or in the
Times.
I love them, and there’s something especially compelling about stories dealing with animal sexuality, don’t ask me why. But, rubbing the salt out of my eye, I wondered: did they have to run this particular story on Easter Sunday? As the magazine’s cover story?

T
he November 2009 massacre at an Army deployment center at Fort Hood, Texas, which took thirteen lives and wounded thirty other soldiers and civilian personnel, was the most serious terrorist incident on American soil since 9/11. It also raised deeply disturbing questions about ethnicity and religion in relation to the War on Terror and to the U.S. military. Had the shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an American-born Palestinian, simply gone berserk, perhaps as a result of treating mentally damaged soldiers upon their return from Iraq and Afghanistan? Or was he following precepts of jihadi extremism, putting his loyalty to the Koran above his oath
to the Constitution? Was he a self-radicalized “lone wolf” or part of a wider plot set in motion by an unseen Islamist fifth column in the Army? And whether his actions reflected personal pathology, religious extremism, or both together, how had he come to be commissioned as a highly trained U.S. Army medical officer, and promoted to the rank of major just six months earlier?