Gay Journalists US Media Conference

TOPICS: Gay journalists media. National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association in the US. Gay marketing. Gay journalists and media. Gay and lesbian communications. Lesbian and gay communications. Gay media news. Lesbian and gay media campaign. NLGJA. US association of lesbian and gay journalists holds annual conference in San Diego.

Ian Johnson, Out Now
September 6, 2007

Sometimes what is left unsaid, is as powerful as what is actually said.

A case in point is the reporting of last weekend's annual US conference of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, held in San Diego. The NLGJA is a well-respected professional association for lesbians and gays working in US media.

The conference was sponsored by some of the biggest names in news - even including the Rupert Murdoch owned Fox News network, which is quite often criticized as holding conservative, and at times even anti-gay views.

The presenting sponsor was the Canadian Tourism Board and the other brand names in the sponsors list includes an impressive who's who in the world of media and consumer marketing in the US: CNN, ESPN, JetBlue Airways, CBS News, General Motors, Toyota, Orbitz, VisitBritain, Bloomberg, Coca-Cola, Sony Pictures and Television, ABC News, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Washington Post, as well as the aforementioned Fox News Network.

Fairly impressive of course. But some of the reports that are out there about this conference struck us as slightly 'pointed'.

Imagine if you will that these same brands sponsored a conference on journalists with an African American background. It would be less than remarkable, and so too should it be unremarkable here too.

Yet a couple of 'mainstream' online media sources have various unusual ways of reporting the conference.

The California Catholic Daily talks about the "media clout" of "corporate-funded homosexual journalists" - but manages to never once use the now almost universally accepted most common usage of the term gay to describe people who are homosexual.

Over at Arizona's National Ledger you get to read the opinions of one Cliff Kincaid who tells his readers about "celebration of the homosexual lifestyle".

I am reminded of a long-ago badge I remember reading: "It's not a lifestyle. It's a life."

Under the racy sub-heading "Media In Bed With Gays" Kincaid breathlessly reports on the NLGJA conference in the following terms:

"All of the major media, it seems, are involved to some extent or another in pandering to the homosexual movement."

Forgive me just a little for taking offence, but if you had seen someone write something like "pandering to the African American 'movement' " and you yourself happened to be of African-American background, you might understand my being bothered by language as deliberately emotive as "pandering" to a "movement".

Just to close on this thought, being gay is not a "lifestyle". It is - for people who happen to be homosexual in sexual orientation - something that is entirely natural. It happens all through nature and is not something dreamed up by subversive human beings intent on ruining society.

And that, Mr Kincaid, is something you really need to learn.
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