The Boston Phoenix
November 26 - December 3, 1998

[Don't Quote Me]

Private lives

Fox 25 exploits gays for cheap ratings points. Plus, Bill Galvin dismisses Channel 7's solid voter-fraud story, and what's wrong with Beacon Hill coverage.

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

A television news producer walks into some reedy overgrowth in Weston's Riverside Park, a hidden camera strapped to his body at crotch level. A man approaches. Almost immediately, the man drops his pants and (we are told) begins masturbating -- and is handcuffed and hauled away by a nearby state trooper.

As it turns out, his troubles are just beginning. For this is "Fox 25 News Undercover," and by God, they're not going to drop this one until they've gotten to the bottom of it. A camera zooms in on the suspect's wedding ring, then his face -- several times. We're told he's 68 years old. We're told his name.

"I was going to take a leak," he protests to reporter Deborah Sherman. "He [the producer] says, 'Come here, I'm going to the car to get something. Would you be interested?' "

But Sherman's not satisfied. She's got one more question. "Why," she asks, "did you come to a park?"

He turns away, and is bundled into the waiting cruiser.

There are few media spectacles more revolting than the exploitation of the powerless for cheap entertainment. And the November 9 report on public sex broadcast by WFXT-TV (Channel 25) was certainly that. For several grossly overhyped minutes, Sherman led us through the Blue Hills Reservation, where MDC park ranger Pat Flynn spoke disgustedly about men getting "their lunchtime fix"; interviewed a young man named Michael Simmons, who talked about his occasional visits to "PSAs" (public-sex areas); and offered us a shrink who spoke of the "sexual dysfunction" (horniness?) that drives some men to seek whoopee in unlikely places.

If you think you've seen this story before, then you must get around. Because Sherman's report, far from being original, was one of about 20 cookie-cutter pieces done around the country this year -- starting in Seattle and spreading to New York, Charlotte, and Miami, among other places -- by local news operations looking for easy ratings points at the expense of gay men.

Here's how it works: log on to a Web site that goes by the rather literal name of Cruisingforsex.com; look up a cruising site in your area; and send out a camera crew. Voilà! All that's left is to figure out when the next sweeps week is coming up.

"It's hard for local news to get much more disgusting," says Jim Naureckas, editor of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting's monthly magazine, Extra. "Humiliation is what you're selling. To see people getting humiliated -- and especially to see gay men getting humiliated -- is something that local news stations think there's an audience for. It's exploitation in its purest form."

To be fair, Channel 25 was not the first Boston station to do a public-sex story based on Cruisingforsex.com. WCVB-TV (Channel 5), which, bit by bit, keeps chipping away at its Tiffany reputation, did a piece last May. But Channel 5 broadcast a fairly serious report on the problems associated with public sex at parks and in public restrooms, skipping the hidden-camera stunt that made 25's story (and so many like it across the country) so memorable.

Of course, public sex is illegal; when you're walking along a wooded trail or accompanying your son to the men's room at the local mall, you don't want to encounter someone in the throes of passion. Too often, though, advocates say gay men are singled out -- busted and charged with a felony -- for behavior that would earn nothing more than a stern "move it along" if a cop encountered a straight couple having sex.

"There has to be equal application," says Gary Buseck, executive director of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD). "There has been too much of a history of charging gay men with a felony when a misdemeanor or a warning could be used." What makes unequal application of the laws especially pernicious, he says, is that gay men can be forced to sign up with the state's sex-offender registry for having consensual sex with an adult -- hardly what drafters of the law had in mind. But the law isn't the only way gay men are treated unequally. Where, for instance, are those hard-hitting Fox reports on high-school kids getting it on in the back seats of their parents' cars?

Jeff Epperly, editor of the local gay newspaper Bay Windows, who wrote a commentary about the Channel 25 piece last week, attended a conference on the subject at the convention of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association earlier this year. "It's just the 1970s all over again," he says. "I'm just tired of these people and their bogus claims that this is news, when it's always done during sweeps."

Neither Channel 25 news director Coleen Marren nor station spokeswoman Susan Pascal responded to requests for comment. Sherman seemed eager to discuss her story: during a brief conversation, when I asked her whether it was necessary to show the suspect's face and identify him by name, she replied straightforwardly, "It's something we still continue to talk about, and we keep changing our minds." But when I sought a longer interview, she said my inquiry had been referred to general manager Gregg Kelley. He did not return a call to his office.

No surprise. There's nothing good to say about this ugly, exploitative excuse for news. As Epperly says, "I think the term toilet journalism applies here."

At the end of Sherman's segment, the male coanchor segued with this lascivious comment: "It is an eye-opener when you get something like that on tape, isn't it?" Next rolled a promo of the next segment -- a look at Hulk Hogan's budding presidential campaign.


Public officials tend not to express gratitude when the media point out their shortcomings. Still, the churlish response from Secretary of State Bill Galvin's office and from the Boston Election Commission regarding a recent investigative report aired by WHDH-TV (Channel 7) is disappointing because it demonstrates a bureaucratic mindset geared toward butt-covering rather than problem-solving.

In mid-October, Channel 7 reported that the Massachusetts Voter Registry Information System, which comes under the secretary of state's purview, is utterly inadequate when it comes to the task of weeding out ineligible voters, including people who are registered in more than one community or who are illegally registered at a business address.

Veteran investigative reporter Hank Phillippi Ryan, using computerized state records from Boston, Cambridge, Lowell, Revere, Framingham, and New Bedford, turned up what she called a "serious potential for voter fraud," with "thousands of people right now . . . able to vote more than once." And she interviewed Karen Saranita, of the California-based Fair Elections Group, who showed how a $29 piece of software could be used to flag double registrations.

The piece wasn't particularly earth-shattering (despite Channel 7's characteristically dramatic graphics) -- just a classic bit of public-interest journalism, in which both a problem and a potential solution are identified. Phillippi Ryan says she picked up the idea at an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference; and shortly after her piece aired, 60 Minutes did a similar story.

Yet Jack McCarthy, Galvin's chief of staff, speaks of Phillippi Ryan's work with contempt. "I've done nothing in response to that story because it's a bogus story," he says. "She didn't understand the system." Essentially, his complaints boil down to two: (1) many of the duplicate registrations she found involve so-called inactive voters (a category that has ballooned because of the motor-voter law), and inactive voters can't cast ballots without identification; and (2) local election commissions, rather than the secretary of state's office, are in charge of maintaining the integrity of their voter lists. McCarthy also says Phillippi Ryan failed to point out the progress Galvin's office has made on other fronts, such as correlating registration lists with public-health records to help local officials weed out dead voters.

Phillippi Ryan's report included an interview with Boston Election Commission member John Donovan, who came across as helpful and concerned about Channel 7's findings. Yet his boss, commission chairman Abe Hantout, is also dismissive of the piece, calling it "a non-story" and praising the state's computer system.

"Now that we have a central database, I think we're getting almost to perfection in avoiding double names and double registrations," Hantout says. Just this side of paradise, apparently.

Trouble is, the Channel 7 piece unquestionably identified a real problem. Indeed, shortly before the election the Phoenix discovered that a well-known political activist, unbeknownst to her, was eligible to vote in two communities. Galvin has won a lot of praise for improving his office's computer operations, but there's little doubt that things could be better.

Phillippi Ryan responds to McCarthy's complaint by noting that many of the double registrants she found were not inactive voters; and, even so, someone determined to help a candidate could easily get a fake ID and present her- or himself as an inactive voter. As for McCarthy's attempt to assign responsibility to local officials, Phillippi Ryan points out that it's the state's computer system those officials must rely on.

"It was clear to me that they're going to do something" about the problem, Phillippi Ryan says of Galvin's office. "But they're so unhappy with me that they're not going to call me and say what it is."


The current issue of CommonWealth magazine, published by the nonpartisan think tank MassINC, contains an unexpectedly candid admission from Boston Globe political editor Doug Bailey as to why the Globe has cut back on coverage of the inner workings of state government.

"The problem I have sending rookie reporters to the State House is they all want to do the page-one takeout," Bailey told Phil Primack, a former Boston Herald reporter. "Especially with new reporters, we want the committees and budget debates covered. But these young reporters say to me, 'Where does a 40-line story inside Metro get me?' With their eyes on their careers, it's not going to get them anywhere."

So what is Bailey's solution? He told Primack he tries to assign them anyway -- but sometimes gives up. "It does wear you out after a while," he's quoted as saying.

Then there's Herald political editor Joe Sciacca, who said to Primack: "I don't like to cover process, I don't like our reporters to cover process, I don't think the public cares about process."

And there, in a nutshell, is everything you need to know about what's wrong with the way Boston's two daily newspapers cover state government.


Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy


Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com


Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here


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