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March coverage

Continued from Page 7

gays in the military. And the religious right's anti-gay backlash has generated even more gay-related stories.

Given the timing of the March, Aarons says editors could not help but find the April 25 event irresistible.

"The [gay] story's been playing big throughout the year," Aarons notes. In addition, he says, "There is a higher sensitivity to gay issues and to the notion of fairer gay coverage. I think that editors don't want to be accused of downplaying something like this. Whether it's 300,000 or 500,000 or a million [people at the March], it's a political march of enormous significance in the nation's capital."

Most mainstream newspapers dealt with the disparity in crowd figures that given by the March organizers (one million) versus that given by the National Park Service (300,000) by referring to "hundreds of thousands" in the lead and then detailing the varying estimates further down in the stories.

But the newspapers' emphasis was on what March organizers-and marchers— had stressed: equality and civil rights. Many referred to the March as one of the largest civil rights demonstrations ever staged in the nation. And Kathleen Buckley, bureau chief for the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times and an NLGJA member, said this emphasis also was true for TV coverage.

The NLGJA asked members to monitor TV coverage in eight metropolitan areas the day of the March. The consensus, Buckley said, was that "overall the content was serious, the focus pretty much on the demands of the March-civil rights, gays in the military... We found that the [March] story appeared as the lead or in the top three stories on nearly all newscasts."

But CNN drew criticism from many of the

monitors, Buckley said, because toward the end of the afternoon, "we were finding some kind of strange news angles on the March." One story, for instance, focused on possible damage to grass on the Mall, and another called the crowd turnout disappointing.

To bolster TV coverage, the March committee put the rally live on satellite for free downlinking by local stations. Dozens of stations, said Adams, also took advantage of the five-minute edited news packages provided free of charge every hour on the hour.

"We were 12 seconds late on one of the feeds," said Nadine Smith, the March cochair in charge of media, "and our phone was ringing off the hook, with different television stations asking where's the feed. It was certainly a powerful indication of how many people were tuned in to what was going on.

"To me, being able to reach the millions who couldn't be there, in our community and the straight community, was a very, very powerful part of this media coverage," said Smith.

Smith said the March committee's commitment to gender and racial parity, on the committee as well as among media spokespersons, went "a long way in sending out another vision of this community, that it is not exclusively white and not exclusively male.”

Will the extensive coverage of the March affect future coverage of gay issues?

Probably, it will. Coverage often generates more coverage, and gay issues are not going away. Moreover, reporters in many places now have new sources in local gay communities. To some extent, it will be up to local gays, buttressed by national groups, to keep the media from slacking off in the wake of the March.

"The issue," said NLGJA's Buckley, "is now that we as the media know how to cover an event, then how does this lead to continued coverage? The whole thing is, I love a good story, and I'd hate to see us miss any more good stories."

Reprinted with permission from the Washington Blade.

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