One student ended his final report in my introductory reporting class by describing how one of Anchorage’s most beloved drag queens was ending his run of popular shows before moving to Portland. He described how the performer slowly stripped off his dress, removed his makeup and yanked the wig off his head — leaving himself exposed, vulnerable and completely human.
I frequently go back to that profile as a gauge of good reporting and writing. Not only did the student go several times to Mad Myrna’s, the best-known gay bar in Anchorage for the story, he also captured the moment the performer let himself really be known to his audience. Most introductory students do not get into that level of reporting. Partly, it is because this student was mature and he cared about the subject. It did not hurt that he was also gay and knew, at least a little, the young man he chose to profile.
But it does not take LGBT people to report sensitively about LGBT issues. And to limit coverage of these issues to reporters who identify as LGBT would do more harm than good: They would risk ghettoizing themselves in newsrooms. Moreover, the complete picture of LGBT issues — and how they touch straight family members, friends and members of the community — might not get fully sketched out.
At the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA), we have chosen not to offer a class specifically on diversity in our journalism and public communications program. Instead, we incorporate a message about how important it is to cover people who are different from us — set apart by culture, skin tone, economics, sexual orientation, physical or mental ability — across the curriculum. Reporting classes address this topic informally when students come up with ideas to cover topics of interest to LGBT people. When we talk about diversity and bias, it comes up more formally.
For example, a case study in our media ethics class asked students to evaluate the responsibility of a photojournalist to his source: A drug-addicted young man whose parents tossed him out of the house when he told them that he was gay. Although the ethical issues involved did not directly concern the man’s sexual orientation, it did force students to at least address any biases about gay youth. Did the man require protection from the photojournalist’s honest reporting? Did his sexual orientation put him at greater risk as a person living on the street in search of his next drug hit?
But classroom lessons go only so far. It is when students begin practicing journalism through student media that they are most at risk of publishing news about LGBT people in simplistic ways, often unintentionally.
Recently, an article in The Northern Light, the campus newspaper I advise, published an article about a college club called The Family. The club formed to provide support to UAA’s LGBT students. Though the student journalist wrote it in an attempt to inform the campus about this group and their activities — especially in light of the fact that posters announcing their meeting times are routinely torn down — the language used to describe club members was problematic. For example, the reporter described Anchorage’s tolerance for “alternative lifestyles.” She also used the word “homosexual” to describe club members, probably not a word choice they would have chosen for themselves. The reporter and I talked about the language after the story ran, and as a result, she will be better prepared the next time she writes about these topics.
Other articles have treated LGBT issues in more nuanced ways. One pro/con opinion layout debated the issue of the state providing benefits to same-sex couples, which the Alaska Supreme Court ruled on. The opposing column argued that forcing the state to subsidize health care for unmarried people is a step closer to universal health care, which Alaska cannot afford to provide to all residents. The writer did not intone Scripture or couch his arguments against same-sex marriage, a refreshing approach compared with the op-ed columns and letters to the editor in the Anchorage Daily News on the subject.
Student journalists engage in trial and error. Most of the time, they get the tone of the news as well as the news itself correct. Occasionally, they stumble. Then I have an opening to push them to be the kind of sensitive reporters that that journalism student was in his profile about the drag queen. It is not a task that every student journalist can do; it is not a task that every professional journalist does either. All I ask for are reporting methods that will provide sensitive coverage, that reveal the complete humanity of subjects and subject matter. If we can do that together — as students and as journalism educators — we are making progress.
