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Times Watch for
November 25, 2003
Editors Note: As today's top three entries show, the Times really, really likes the Massachusetts decision legalizing gay marriage.
"A New Underground Railroad" for Gays to Canada?
Clifford Krauss' Week in Review story on gay marriage compares American gays traveling to Canada to get married to slaves escaping the South. The headline to the Sunday piece suggests a connection: "Gay Couples Follow a Trail North Blazed by Slaves and War Resisters." A teaser embedded in another story on gay marriage makes the connection explicit: "A New Underground Railroad: Hundreds of Americans, fleeing state laws, are going to Canada to marry."
Continuing this incredible gay marriage/escaping slaves analogy, Krauss opens his story on gays going to Canada to get married by quoting Martin Luther King Jr.: "'Heaven was the word for Canada and the Negro sang of the hope that his escape on the Underground Railroad would carry him there,' the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once noted in describing the codes American slaves used in their spirituals to fool their masters before taking flight. Canada is heaven again for Lance W. Bateman and William E. Woods, two American men who were married here recently."
Later Krauss tries to back up his analogy: "'There is an escape now, and that escape is Canada,' [Woods] said. 'As in the time of slavery, we can learn from the experience in Canada that the world does not collapse on us when we achieve justice.' That Mr. Woods would draw a connection between his experience in Canada and the 30,000 blacks who escaped here before the American Civil War is not at all far-fetched, Canadian and American historians say." (Despite what the Times' historians say, you can put Times Watch down for "far-fetched.") To complete the crass attempt to link America's refusal to sanction gay marriage with the tragedy of slavery, the article is accompanied by an 1862 lithograph of a slave fleeing toward Canada before the Civil War.
For the rest of the gay marriage story by Krauss, click here.
• Canada | Gaffes | Gay Marriage | Clifford Krauss | Slavery
"Perfect Timing" for Gay Marriage
Sunday Styles feature an article by wedding pages writer Lois Smith Brady, "For Gay Couples, New Rituals at the Altar," which assumes its readers will feel as giddy as she does about the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage. For Brady, the only potential hiccup is planning for a June wedding: "Last week's ruling by the highest court in Massachusetts legalizing gay marriage was perfectly timed in many ways. It feels like a snowball effect, coming only months after Canada legalized marriage and three years after Vermont allowed civil unions for gay couples. And it comes just in time for same-sex couples to begin planning a June wedding. It also makes one think that same-sex weddings may soon become nearly as commonplace as the traditional black tie, country club and limousine kind."
Brady concludes by portraying gays who marry as heroic: "The detail many guests are likely to remember about Mark Harris and Tony Kushner's commitment ceremony in New York City last April is that everybody cried. Commitment ceremonies tend to be tear-jerkers, involving underdogs and classic American themes. 'We love freedom, we love the libertarian spirit, we love to see triumph,' Ms. Blum said. 'With the exception of the most right-wing people, there is that sense, 'Good for you; you broke through the finish line against all the odds and terrible things that have happened to gay people over the years.'"
For more tips on planning for gay weddings, click here.
• Gay Marriage | Tony Kushner | Labeling Bias | Massachusetts | Lois Smith Brady | Weddings
The Massachusetts ruling opening the door to gay marriage inspires the Times to two striking examples of labeling bias. Here's how White House correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller tilts the battle lines in the gay marriage war in the Sunday Week in Review: "In one corner are the social conservatives with their fists raised against gay marriage, girded for a new battle in the cultural wars. 'Politicians don't want to face it, but they're going to have to,' warned Sandy Rios, the president of Concerned Women for America, a Christian group. 'It's going to be used by groups like ours as a litmus test.' In the other corner are gays, lesbians and their supporters, fists aimed at those who would press for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. 'They'd better think long and hard before they push this, because they're going to have a war on their hands,' said Tony Kushner, the playwright, who won a Pulitzer Prize for 'Angels in America.' 'A real movement for an amendment will electrify this community and bring about an entire new generation of dissent and civil disobedience.'"
While those against gay marriage are "social conservatives," those in favor are not liberals but "gays, lesbians and their supporters." That's despite the fact the supporter quoted most prominently throughout the piece is Marxist playwright Tony Kushner, author of the Reagan-hating "Angels in America." (Kushner is popular at the Times; wedding page writer Lois Smith Brady quotes Kushner in the Times Watch article above, and on May 4 Brady did a full article on the "celebration" ceremony uniting Kushner and partner Mark Harris.) Bumiller mentions conservatives five times in her piece, while finding not a single "liberal" in a story on the liberal issue of gay marriage.
Another Week in Review story, by Tamar Lewin, takes a more academic view of the matter, but replicates the exact pattern of labeling bias as Bumiller: Five conservative mentions versus zero liberals. (For those keeping score at home, that's "conservatives" 10, "liberals" 0.) Lewin writes: "As the courts deal with the issue of same-sex unions, they are reconsidering a fundamental question: What is marriage? And the ruling Tuesday by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that the state constitution gives gay couples the right to marry opens the way for more litigation over the shades of gray."
A column last year by MRC's L. Brent Bozell suggests a reason behind such bias. In the fall of 2002 the Times changed the name of its wedding pages from "Weddings" to "Weddings/Celebrations" in order to mark the domestic partnerships of gay couples. Bozell noted: "The Times was the subject of a prolonged lobbying campaign. In December, officials from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association met with Times publisher Arthur 'Pinch' Sulzberger, who's been extremely gay-friendly. In April, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation met with Managing Editor Gerald Boyd as part of their 'Announcing Equality' campaign. Their lobbying efforts ultimately succeeded."
For Bumiller on gay marriage, click here.
For Lewin on gay marriage, click here.
• Elisabeth Bumiller | Tony Kushner | Labeling Bias | Tamar Lewin | Gay Marriage
Bush: Fundraising Over Funerals
Sunday's lead editorial, "Campaigning in Wartime," wonders why Bush isn't going to the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq, as if it was a common thing for a president to attend individual soldiers' funerals in wartime: "One area in which the president has certainly damaged his image of a commander in chief above the fray is on the very delicate question of the treatment of the war dead. The White House, as is well known, has done everything in its power to keep the image of coffins and grieving families as far away from the TV screen as possible, and neither the president nor his representatives have attended the funerals of any of the fallen soldiers."
But have presidents made it a habit of attending soldiers' funerals during wartime? History suggests not. An article from the History News Network says: "It would appear that few presidents have ever actually attended military funerals, though many used the bully pulpit to draw attention to lives lost in the service of their country."
Then it's time for a callous cheap shot--Bush is going to so many fundraisers he doesn't have time for funerals: "One of the explanations given for this is the desire to leave the families to their private grief, but that could certainly be a decision left to the families themselves. Another is that the president and his chief lieutenants are too busy to attend so many memorials. According to Public Citizen, which keeps exhaustive statistics on the topic, George Bush has attended 35 campaign fund-raisers since June 17 and is expected to attend at least 7 more by the end of the year. Vice President Dick Cheney has attended 31. That averages about three a week for the two men, most of them much farther away from the White House than Dover Air Force Base, where the bodies of the dead soldiers arrive back home."
For the rest of the editorial, click here.
Cowardly CBS Caves in to Censors
An Arts & Leisure piece by Emily Nussbaum on the decline and fall of the television miniseries opens by calling CBS' cancellation of its biased miniseries "The Reagans" "de facto censorship." Nussbaum writes on Sunday: "Recently, CBS caved to political pressure and shunted its mini-series 'The Reagans' off to the Showtime cable network. It was a depressing development for anyone concerned about de facto censorship, network cowardice or the career of James Brolin. But it was also another death rattle for that late, great TV genre: the blockbuster television mini-series."
For the rest of Nussbaum on TV miniseries, click here.
• CBS | Emily Nussbaum | "The Reagans" | Television
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org