Posted by Racer on July 29, 2006, at 11:04:50
In reply to I think homophobia killed a newspaper story I did, posted by PhoenixGirl on July 28, 2006, at 18:21:36
> I spent a lot of time and effort on a story about an HIV positive man who used to smoke crack and prostitute himself. I wrote it as a cautionary tale and to show readers that this kind of thing does happen in the Bible Belt.
>
> However.....The editor said I "picked the wrong person" to profile. He said something like, "We did a story a while ago about a woman who got HIV from her husband. But this guy was smoking crack and everything. Why did you pick him?" I said because people not being careful about sex and then getting HIV is more common than 100% victims who did nothing risky, like the married woman we wrote about.
>
> He also said stuff like "This is a difficult market for a story like this." More than once he referred to "this market". He said some readers will wonder why we would print this story and not one about anti-homosexual activists.
>
> The irony is that part of the story is about the stigma the gay man has had to face.
>
>First of all, his comment that some readers would wonder why you weren't writing about anti-homosexual activists has me cross-eyed. Maybe because I'm not in Georgia, I really don't understand how printing the one has anything at all to do with printing the other.
But your last paragraph? THAT'S a story, too. Can you write it? Send it to another paper -- maybe a, oh, I don't know, a NATIONAL paper? To express what's happening in small time South Georgia news outlets?
I'm not gonna bother to respond to your comment that newspapers aren't just a business. Despite Fox News, some of us still remember that news is not the same as entertainment. It's not supposed to make you feel good, or to feel right -- it's meant to INFORM.
Out here, when the Abu Ghraib photographs came out, people wrote letters to the editor saying that the photos shouldn't have been published, after all, this was a "family paper." My response? No, they shouldn't have been published -- but only because they shouldn't have existed. Since they did exist, I wanted them published. So someone is ashamed to be a citizen of the country whose soldiers did that? Maybe that feeling tells them to get moving to make sure nothing like that happens again.
OK. I'm done now. Can someone help me off my soapbox?
poster:Racer
thread:671528
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20060728/msgs/671743.html