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