07/28/05
MAINSTREAM
PRESS AVOIDS COVERAGE OF SODOMY IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
The Republican Party and the Bush Administration have sodomites and sodomite sympathizers in many key positions. President George W. Bush has the distinction of appointing numerous sodomites to high office (see http://www.daveblackonline.com/george_bush_on_sodomy.htm , as well as various articles published by Puritan News Weekly ).
Yet the mainstream press generally avoids coverage of this ugly fact. One incident, described in the article below, is illustrative of how things generally work.
http://www.signorile.com/articles/nyp97.html :
“Back in 1991, I wrote a cover story
for the Advocate about Pete Williams, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public
Affairs in the Bush administration and Pentagon spokesman throughout the Gulf
War. Williams was known to be gay by higher-ups in the Pentagon, including
then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and, it appeared, President Bush. Meanwhile
the Pentagon was booting gays and lesbians out of the military, claiming they
were a security risk because they might have access to classified information
and could be blackmailed, while the average cook, private or porter had no
access to state secrets. But the truth is, Pete Williams certainly did.
The Washington Post was at the time
faced with a situation similar to the one it faced this past July with regard
to Novak: Should it run a column that named a name?
The veteran syndicated columnist Jack
Anderson had penned a column on the Pentagon’s policy of ejecting gays, and he
pointed by name to Pete Williams’ homosexuality as an example of the Pentagon’s
hypocrisy, citing my upcoming Advocate story, an advance of which had been sent
to him. There had been public protests by gay activists against the policy at
the Pentagon, where Williams’ name and face had been plastered on signs. Some
smaller news outlets and local tv had also named Williams by that point,
referencing the Advocate story, and Anderson had called Williams for a quote on
rumors that he might resign.
"Williams says he is not paid
to talk about his personal life nor offer his personal opinions on
issues," Anderson wrote in the syndicated column sent out to 700 papers.
"He told us he has ‘no plans’ to resign, but that could change on [Defense
Secretary Dick] Cheney’s request. If Williams stays and the questions persist,
the Pentagon will have a hard time defending its dubious policy against gay
soldiers–a policy that is already on unsteady ground."
The Post killed the column entirely,
though it could have let it run without naming Williams and simply saying a
"Pentagon official" was outed–as it later was forced to do, as the
controversy grew. Anderson’s column did, however, run in Williams’ hometown
daily, Cheyenne’s Wyoming Tribune-Eagle. That paper even ran a follow-up the
next day with quotes from Williams, who wouldn’t address his sexuality but did
say he wasn’t resigning. With Williams giving interviews on the subject and
with everyone–including his family–in his home state knowing all the facts, was
the Washington Post really protecting Williams’ privacy? Or was it protecting
his bosses from an embarrassing exposure regarding a controversial military
policy?
Naming Valerie Plame potentially
damaged national security, blowing not just her cover but possibly the cover of
her contacts around the world. It ended her career as a covert operative and
may have destroyed the careers of others as well. It could even have put lives
at risk. Pete Williams, on the other hand, was not only known to be gay by his
friends and superiors in the administration, but was never forced to resign.
(He even landed a big job as a correspondent at NBC when he left the White
House, disproving the notion that reporting on people’s unstated but well-known
homosexuality destroys their careers.)
Curiously, in both cases the Post
benefited a Bush administration, at least in the short term. Fred Hiatt, the
Washington Post’s editorial page editor, has expressed that "in
retrospect, I wish I had asked more questions" of Novak before publishing
Plame’s name. I believe him when he says his guard was down, but, curiously,
editors’ guards often seem to be down when the right floats something dubious,
while there is constant vigilance about not letting activists on the left
"manipulate" them, to the point that many stories go unreported.
Right-leaning pundits are fair and balanced, while left-leaning ones are just
pushing an agenda. In almost all of the reporting about Novak’s outing of
Plame–including on CNN, which apparently fears he might cut loose and go to Fox
if they criticize the guy–we keep hearing that he is a fair, balanced and even
"wonderful" journalist. In fact, he’s a biased hack and attack dog
for the Bush administration. Amidst the high-minded arguments about
"ethics" and the relationship journalists have to their sources,
where are the stories about the identity of the criminal leak in the White
House? Surely every editor in Washington now knows who it is.
Back in 1991, none of the Pentagon reporters who sat in the briefing room would ask Williams about the Advocate cover story, which had already been referenced–without naming Williams–by Sam Donaldson in a talk with Dick Cheney on ABC’s This Week. The only one who finally asked the question was a German reporter who was seized upon by some gay activists before entering the building and begged to bring up the question. With the story coming just after the Gulf War, when reporters were conditioned like dogs to happily consume the little morsels of information doled out to them, no reporter who needed Williams was about to displease him. The same dynamic operates today, with the White House reporters trained not to bite the hand that feeds. “
We should not expect the mainstream press thoroughly to investigate the “Jeff Gannon” case, any more than it did the male prostitution ring doing business at the White House during the administration of President George H.W. Bush (see article at http://www.puritans.net/news/gannon072605.htm ). I personally suspect that for as much as mainstream press-types sneer at Republican hypocrisy, they fear what gullible ‘far right’ Christians might do if the wool were not pulled over their eyes by the power brokers in the Republican Party. So long as the ‘Christian far right’ is in the pocket of the Republican Party, status quo libertinism is pretty safe in America.