Gray Lady Down

by William McGowan

  Around the same time, in late February, gay marriages started being performed officially in New Paltz, New York, hitherto known mainly for its college and for being the weekend home of Arthur Sulzberger Jr. The Times gave several glowing profiles to Jason West, the 26-year-old mayor who launched the experiment. In “Mayor Wedding Gay Couples Has History of Activism,” Thomas Crampton wrote, “At age 6, his father says, he refused to eat McDonald’s food because of environmental concerns about plastic-foam containers. At age 17, he declined all Christmas presents, to protest commercialization of the holiday.” After the first set of weddings, which involved twenty-five couples, Mayor West told Crampton, “I am willing to go to jail to hold these marriages,” and added, “This is a stand any decent American should take.”

  Some of the weddings received cloying coverage. “Rushing Out of the Closet and Down the Aisle” described a retired U.S. Army major who was marrying a Dutch-born “sometime designer of haute couture accessories for pets.” The two had wanted more time to plan but decided that seizing the opportunity was wise. The Dutchman called his wedding day “the greatest day of his life.” He was grateful “to Mayor Jason West for permitting me to make a public declaration of my love for Jeff. Jeff and I sat down in the front of the bus for the first time and began a new phase of our lives together.”

  A Times editorial of March 7 cheered local officials such as Mayor Newsom and Mayor West for pushing the next step in civil rights:To the Virginia judge who ruled that Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, could not marry, the reason was self-evident. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” he [the judge] wrote. “And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages.” Calling marriage one of the “basic civil rights of man,” the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that Virginia had to let interracial couples marry. Thirty-seven years from now, the reasons for opposing gay marriage will no doubt feel just as archaic, and the right to enter into it will be just as widely accepted.

  The editorial maintained that “Testing the law is a civil rights tradition: Jim Crow laws were undone by blacks who refused to obey them.”

  In July 2006, New York State’s highest court ruled against gay marriage, rejecting the comparison with antimiscegenation laws and declaring that the state had a legitimate interest in protecting children. “Intuition and experience suggest that a child benefits from having before his or her eyes, every day, living models of what both a man and a woman are like,” the judges said, which meant that the state had a legitimate interest in promoting heterosexual marriages over same-sex ones. The Times was livid. A gay reporter, Patrick Healy, wrote in a front-page account:Yesterday’s court ruling against gay marriage was more than a legal rebuke—it came as a shocking insult to gay rights groups. Leaders said they were stunned by both the rejection and the decision’s language, which they saw as expressing more concern for the children of heterosexual couples than for the children of gay couples. They also took exception to the ruling’s description of homosexuality as a preference rather than an orientation.

  An editorial, “Gay Marriage Setback,” took a whip to the court, accusing it of harming both the constitutional guarantee of equal protection and its reputation as a guardian of individual liberties. The argument that “children benefit from being raised by two natural parents” was, the Times claimed, “without hard evidence.” The editorial applauded a dissent by one particularly liberal judge, Judith Kaye, especially her contention that future generations would “look upon barring gay marriage as akin to the laws that once barred interracial marriage.”

  The paper’s “implicit advocacy,” as Daniel Okrent called it, was also underscored by how it characterized the opposition as repressed and unsophisticated homophobes. There was one notable exception: Peter Steinfels, who wrote in his column that the concern about moral values was not “a disguise for ignorance, irrationality and intolerance.” Whatever one may think about same-sex marriage, he pointed out, “it takes a real stretch to pretend that it is not a noteworthy departure from existing social and legal norms.” But for the most part, the Times dismissed all opposition as bigotry and hatred, and assumed that the granting of same-sex marriage privileges was inevitable.

  When the California Supreme Court, in May 2008, overturned the law passed in 2000 stating that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California,” the Times extolled a new wave of court-sanctioned gay marriage. Patricia Leigh Brown’s report in mid June, “California Braces for ‘New Summer of Love,’” was illustrated with a picture of two lesbians who had been together for 49 years walking on a beach. Brown noted that California, unlike Massachusetts, did not limit marriage licenses to residents of the state, thus resurrecting old postcard images of California as the “Promised Land.” According to this report, California businesses in a wilted economy were welcoming the wanna-be marrieds with open arms. The Times used its website powers to solicit stories, photos and video from readers who were heading to California, and then produced a series of multimedia offerings about these California nuptials. A Times food writer, Kim Severson, wrote about her own plans to get married in California, as well as the boon to catering businesses.

  Meanwhile, California residents quickly gathered signatures to put a new proposition on the ballot, this one to write the language of the earlier measure into the state’s constitution. Voters passed Proposition 8 in November 2008, and the Times decried the outcome as the “tyranny” of the majority over the minority. An editorial blamed “right-wing forces led by the Mormon Church,” which had “poured tens of millions of dollars into the campaign” for “a measure to enshrine bigotry in the state’s Constitution.” When the California Supreme Court upheld the constitutional amendment in May 2009, a Times editorial called the decision “an affront to gay men and lesbians and to fundamental values enshrined in the state Constitution.” In addition to denying basic fairness to gay people, the editorial claimed, the court’s 6-1 ruling set an unfortunate legal precedent “that could allow the existing rights of any targeted minority to be diminished using the Election Day initiative process.”

  What distinguished the Times’ coverage of this round in the California gay marriage saga were the stories omitted as much as the ones reported. Supporters of Proposition 8 had predicted that the legalization of gay marriage might lead to the teaching of gay marriage in the schools. In fact, a group of San Francisco first graders were present at City Hall when their teacher was married, in a ceremony presided over by Gavin Newsom himself—who reportedly was less than pleased to see the kids there. In Hay-ward, California, five-year-olds were asked to sign pledge cards promising their support to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. As one Prop 8 organizer noted in the Wall Street Journal, not only could these kindergartners barely sign their names to the cards, but many had Spanish-speaking parents who needed to have the cards translated before they realized what their kids had signed. These stories of young children being used in this campaign triggered outrage, but did not appear in the Times.

  The Times did report on how Proposition 8 had stirred up a “new wave of activists,” which someone dubbed “Stonewall 2.0.” It also reported that some supporters of Prop 8, particularly in the arts, lost their jobs after disclosure laws exposed them to retaliation; that others were intimidated in their homes, courtesy of maps put out on the Web; and that some supporters and donors were sent envelopes containing white powder in the mail. But some of the physical harassment that activists employed against Prop 8 supporters—stomping on signs, attacking elderly people, vandalizing a Catholic Church wrongly assumed to have supported the initiative—apparently wasn’t news fit to print. And the editorial page, which might have weighed in for freedom of speech, was silent.

  When a federal appeals court judge overturned Proposition 8 on equal protection grounds in August 2010, the Times editorialized that this
decision was “a stirring and eloquently reasoned denunciation of all forms of irrational discrimination, the latest link in a chain of pathbreaking decisions that permitted interracial marriages and decriminalized gay sex between consenting adults.”

  On March 29, 2010, the New York Times Magazine featured a cover photo of two really cute white bunny rabbits, along with the question “Can Animals Be Gay?” The story inside led with a discussion of the discovery that one-third of Laysan albatrosses, a downy seabird that breeds on the northwestern tip of Oahu, Hawaii, raise their offspring in same-sex pairings. According to the author, Jon Mooallem, “The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody’s nose for what you might call ‘straight’ couples.” The piece exhibited a certain self-awareness. Mooallem wrote that when the discovery was first disclosed in a scientific journal, some news stories praised the research while others called it “pure propaganda and selective science at its dumbest” that was intended to “further an agenda.”

  Animal stories have been a staple of American journalism forever, whether in tabloids, on TV or in the Times. I love them, and there’s something especially compelling about stories dealing with animal sexuality, don’t ask me why. But, rubbing the salt out of my eye, I wondered: did they have to run this particular story on Easter Sunday? As the magazine’s cover story?

  eight

  War on Terror

  The November 2009 massacre at an Army deployment center at Fort Hood, Texas, which took thirteen lives and wounded thirty other soldiers and civilian personnel, was the most serious terrorist incident on American soil since 9/11. It also raised deeply disturbing questions about ethnicity and religion in relation to the War on Terror and to the U.S. military. Had the shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an American-born Palestinian, simply gone berserk, perhaps as a result of treating mentally damaged soldiers upon their return from Iraq and Afghanistan? Or was he following precepts of jihadi extremism, putting his loyalty to the Koran above his oath to the Constitution? Was he a self-radicalized “lone wolf” or part of a wider plot set in motion by an unseen Islamist fifth column in the Army? And whether his actions reflected personal pathology, religious extremism, or both together, how had he come to be commissioned as a highly trained U.S. Army medical officer, and promoted to the rank of major just six months earlier?

  The Washington Post intensified these questions by reporting that when Hasan was a medical resident in psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Hospital, he gave a PowerPoint presentation not on a medical topic but on “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.” He included the comment, “It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims,” and presented some basics of Islamic thought and teaching, such as: “We [Muslims] love death more then [sic] you love life!” The final slide read: “Recommendation: Department of Defense should allow Muslims [sic] Soldiers the option of being released as ‘Conscientious objectors’ to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events.” The Post also reported on a presentation that Hasan gave as part of a master’s program in public health, this one asking whether the war on terror was “a war against Islam.”

  According to NPR, such inappropriate actions, along with others, drew the attention of senior Army medical personnel at Walter Reed. The senior psychiatric officer drafted a memo citing Hasan’s lack of professionalism and work ethic. NPR also reported that he had been chastised for proselytizing to patients. Colleagues said he was someone with whom they would never want to be “in a foxhole”; others worried that once deployed to Afghanistan he might give secrets to the enemy. One classmate called him a “ticking time bomb.”

  Many news organizations were upfront about the underlying reasons why Hasan’s superiors, especially those at Walter Reed, had dropped the ball so egregiously. As Time magazine reported four days after the shooting, the most troubling possibility in the Hasan case was that “the Army looked the other way precisely because he was a Muslim.” Some in a position to do or say something were afraid of a discrimination complaint “that could ruin careers.”

  The New York Times, however, was oddly reluctant to explore the facts behind Hasan’s religious extremism and the institutional hypersensitivity that may have allowed him to advance in his medical career. The paper took a back seat to other news organizations, citing facts associated with Nidal’s apparent jihadist tendencies only well after the Post and other media did so, and only in language that downplayed the most disturbing information about Hasan’s motives. Instead, the Times focused on what had become part of its multicultural creed: anti-Muslim discrimination and second-hand combat stress from an illegitimate, incompetently waged war. In the first ten days after the massacre, beyond reporting that Hasan had gotten up on a desk and screamed “Alahu Akbar,” the Times saw an isolated psychological event.

  A report on day two from a mosque in Fort Hood where Hasan had worshipped carried a statement by another worshipper: “When a white guy shoots up a post office, they call that going postal,” said Victor Benjamin II, a former member of the Army. “But when a Muslim does it, they call it jihad.” An editorial the same day counseled that it was important “to avoid drawing prejudicial conclusions from the fact that Major Hasan is an American Muslim whose parents came from the Middle East.... But until investigations are complete, no one can begin to imagine what could possibly have motivated this latest appalling rampage.”

  The Times expressed concerns about an anti-Muslim backlash in the services and affirmed the much-criticized comments of General George Casey, who said on Meet the Press that “Our diversity, not only in our Army but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” In a report headlined “Complications Grow for Muslims Serving in U.S. Military,” Andrea Elliott cited Casey’s concern for diversity and stressed the theme of alienation and discrimination. “Whatever his possible motives, the emerging portrait of Major Hasan’s life in the military casts light on some of the struggles and frustrations felt by other Muslims in the services,” Elliott wrote. According to friends and relatives, Hasan was disillusioned with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he perceived as part of a war on Islam, and had been singled out and taunted by fellow soldiers for being Muslim. Elliott quoted his uncle in Ramallah, Rafik Hamad, saying that Hasan had once been called a “camel jockey.”

  The other story line that the Times used to dodge the idea of religious motivation was “combat stress,” which it implied Hasan had developed in treating returning soldiers who themselves had post-traumatic stress disorder. “Every man has his breaking point,” wrote Erica Goode, quoting World War II military doctors. For Nidal Hasan, she continued, that breaking point “may have come even before he experienced the reality of war.” His own psyche may have been “undone by the kind of stress he treated.”

  A report on November 15, nearly ten days after the attack, marked the first time the paper reluctantly acknowledged facts that other news organizations had dug up nearly from the beginning. Headlined “Investigators Study Tangle of Clues on Fort Hood Suspect,” it disclosed that Hasan had the letters “SOA” (for Soldier of Allah) on the business cards he used when moonlighting as a civilian psychiatrist. The article also noted that some of his supervisors at Walter Reed were wary of “appearing insensitive to Muslim culture,” and finally mentioned the PowerPoint presentation about the Koranic worldview and its effects on Muslim soldiers.

  Political and moral seriousness was lacking in the Times’ coverage of the Army’s January 2010 report on the Fort Hood case. The Times called the report a “sobering look” at “Major Hasan’s Smooth Ascension,” but never noted—as Time did—that the 86-page report “not once mentions Major Nidal Hasan by name or even discusses whether the killings may have had anything to do with the suspect’s view of his Muslim faith.” (The r
eport referred to him as the “alleged perpetrator.”) Although the report, and the Times, did acknowledge that there were missteps on the part of Hasan’s superiors as he rose through the ranks, both the report and the Times failed to identify perhaps the key driving factor in his ascent. As the military analyst Ralph Peters wrote, “Hasan’s superiors feared—correctly—that any attempt to call attention to his radicalism or to prevent his promotion would backfire on them, destroying their careers, not his. Hasan was a protected-species minority. Under the p.c. tyranny of today’s armed services, no non-minority officer was going to take him on.”

  In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Times reported on the disarray in the country’s visa and deportation systems that had allowed Mohammed Atta and his gang to pull off their assault on America, and on the number of Arab men in the United States who fit virtually the same background profile as the nineteen hijackers. The Times also reported on problems in communication between our national security, intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies, most notably “the Wall” erected in the Clinton years that made it illegal for the FBI and the CIA to communicate and cooperate with respect to leads and intelligence reports related to the 9/11 attack. But it was not long before an oppositional stance asserted itself. Within two months of the attack, the paper was casting aspersions on the ability of the government to fight terrorism; expressing grave concerns that the fight against terrorism might lead to the “loss of the country’s soul”; and opining that the theoretical loss of civil liberties under the USA Patriot Act would do “lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws,” as one editorial put it in 2004.