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HORRIBLE COVERAGE OF A HORRIBLE MURDER
Reed Irvine On September 26, 1999, 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising died lying face-down with his legs bound with belts and duct tape and his arms taped to a mattress on the floor. Pillows had been placed under his abdomen. His briefs had been stuffed in his mouth, secured by duct tape. His undershirt had been put over his head. He died of asphyxiation after having been tortured, raped and sodomized over a period of several hours. Two homosexuals, Joshua Brown, 22, and Davis Carpenter, 38, were charged with capital murder and six counts of rape. The prosecutor said that what he saw in their apartment was perhaps the most horrific thing he had witnessed in his career. The Associated Press covered the story, but gave it only regional distribution. Nearly a month after the murder, on Oct. 22, the Washington Times ran the story on its front page. The Associated Press put it on its national wire on Oct. 29. The Washington Post, which had run over 80 stories about the murder of Matthew Shepard, a homosexual college student in Wyoming, ran 57 words from the AP story about Jesse Dirkhising. That was better than most of the print and electronic media. A Nexis search found only 176 stories about Dirkhising in 1999 and over 3,000 stories about Matthew Shepard in the month after his murder in 1998. The Dirkhising story broke into national news again with the trial and conviction of Joshua Brown on the charge of first degree murder on March 22. The Washington Times was one of three out-of-state newspapers that reported the trial, using Arkansas Democrat-Gazette stories. The others were the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Tulsa World, which used AP stories. In addition to reporting Brown’s conviction on page one, the Times ran an excellent 1,200-word story by Robert McCain about the double standard in the coverage of stories like this. The media deny there is a double standard. A spokesman for ABC News called it "a local crime story that does not raise the kind of issues that would warrant our coverage." Sandy Genelius, speaking for CBS News, said, "Obviously we can’t cover every story that happens in this country every day, so each day we make an editorial judgment, and on the days when (the Dirkhising murder) story was unfolding the overall editorial judgment was that it couldn’t fit into the broadcast that day." Responding to the question in 1999, Jonathan Gregg on "Time on Line" came up with this rationalization: "The reason the Dirkhising story received so little play is because it offered no lessons. Shepard’s murder touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society’s attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one’s own demons. Jesse Dirkhising’s death gives us nothing except the depravity of two sick men." This is still the dominant attitude in the establishment media, but we see some encouraging changes. Even a few homosexuals have broken ranks and criticized the wildly disparate treatment of the Shepard and Dirkhising stories. One is Andrew Sullivan, who said in his column in The New Republic, "This discrepancy isn’t just real. It’s staggering." The increasingly popular Fox News Channel is doing something about it. It has aired 15 reports on the Dirkhising case this year. CNN has not touched the story, which helps explain why it is losing viewers to Fox. There is no great mystery about this. When homosexuals, or people who are sympathetic to the homosexual agenda or are afraid of incurring their wrath, have the power to decide what is news and what is not, stories that expose homosexual practices that are dangerous and repugnant to the overwhelming majority of people are not going to be reported. The suppression last year of the tapes that proved that educators in Massachusetts, using state funds, were giving young students "how-to" lectures on disgusting and dangerous homosexual practices proved this. The Jonathan Greggs don’t see any need to report such things even when they result in death. Richard Berke, national political correspondent of the New York Times and a member of the Gay & Lesbian Journalists Association, has said that on any given day three-fourths of those at the meeting where it is decided what stories will be on the front page of the New York Times are "not-so-closeted homosexuals." That is why the New York Times has never reported the Jesse Dirkhising story. Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org
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