Students are postgay, JMC education mostly pregay
By Dr. Dane S. Claussen, professor and director of graduate programs, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, Point Park University
In Saturday’s issue of the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, Robert Reynolds (author of What Happened to Gay Life?) told readers what is nicely summed up in the headline of his article, “More than gay, the young ones move on.” Presumably like his book (which I haven’t read), the article explains about how young gay Australians, especially men under 25, aren’t complaining about the fragmentation and decline of “gay culture” and gay institutions as much as they are ignoring it. Reynolds doesn’t blame them, but his analysis is bizarre, to say the least.
He writes about young gay Australian men’s lack of interest in a gay part of the city and Mardi Gras, “This doesn’t make them immature; they are just not that interested in gay life. They have moved on, and who can blame them? There is no point bewailing that the world has changed. Save that energy for the unfinished battles, such as civil unions and combating anti-gay violence and attitudes. After all, the spirit of rampant individuality is just as much a part of Mardi Gras history as collective gay identity.”
Reynolds doesn’t seem to understand that young gay men who barely identify as being gay at all are extremely unlikely to put any “energy” at all into the “unfinished battles,” while antigay organizations always will be better organized (if much more so in the United States than Australia), and will think of gay men as only gay while denying them rights in legislatures and courts.
What does this have to do with U.S. journalism and journalism education? This “postgay” phenomenon is prevalent among young gay and lesbian Americans, too, and essentially all U.S. news media except a few magazines (such as gay-oriented magazines and Details) have completely missed the story. The U.S. gay community, at least the men, can generally be broken down into political/cultural generations that I call the “homosexual generation,” the “gay generation,” and the “queer generation,” although perhaps the latter one should be called the “queer or whatever generation.” The latter generation seems to be entirely rejecting the “homosexual generation’s” culture and institutions (except perhaps a few who go to bath houses) and much of the “gay generation’s,” too. The news media don’t get this, either, in large part because even young gay men and their welcoming/accepting/tolerant straight friends don’t know enough about the history of gay culture and politics in the United States to see it and understand it. Yet the overwhelming apathy of the GLBT community in the United States toward the passage of state statutes and constitutional amendments banning gay marriage (that was never legal in the first place) was a huge story, and a hugely undercovered one.
Formal journalism education is not helping here. Very few U.S. j-schools address sexual orientation for more than an hour or two in their entire curricula, if that, and GLBT issues and GLBT media are almost completely absent from widely used journalism and mass communication textbooks. If our students are “postgay,” our JMC curricula and textbooks are still overwhelmingly “pregay.” No wonder the U.S. news media are missing the story.
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*Dr. Dane S. Claussen is a professor and director of graduate programs, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, Point Park University, where he teaches Applied Mass Communication Research Methods; Sociology of Journalism, and Media Ethics; Mass Communication History; Newspaper and Magazine Management; Writing the Nonfiction Book; and Communication Law and Regulation.
Dr. Claussen is author or editor of four books, including “Anti-intellectualism in American Media: Magazines and Higher Education” (Peter Lang Publishing, 2004) and “Sex, Religion, Media” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). He currently is editor of the quarterly Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, and serves on the editorial boards of 11 other scholarly journals.
Dr. Claussen is Vice-Head/Program Chair, Magazine Division; and former Head, GLBT Interest Group, former Head, Mass Communication & Society Division, and former Head, History Division. He also holds numerous posts in the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.
I agree with this analysis. On many levels, the lack of attention paid to gay and lesbian issues in the media is appalling enough, but what does exist is often superceded by an amazing degree of ignorance about the subjects in those stories. Mainstream media is too often enamored of sensationalism, so what takes precedent in a story about GLBT issues in the press are the most outrageous quotes from religious bigots and conservative shills in the name of “balance.” We don’t ever see this same degree of “balance” in covering issues about, for example, “straight white men”. . .after all, as the dominant group in both education and the industry, we are expected to believe there are no issues involving them as a group – their attitudes are inherently “mainstream” because they own the business and the educational system.
But on the educational level, the unwillingness to link issues involving coverage of the GLBT population with broader journalism issues is amazing. I can remember a few years ago, while being evaluated during a semester when I was teaching a basic reporting class, presenting a lecture/workshop on writing obituaries. Since there was such disparity at the time between what was acceptable in a newspaper obituary between heterosexual relationships and same-sex partnerships, I included one example of an obituary of a partnered gay man. Students readily observed the difference in coverage just by reading the sample, so we spent about thirty minutes discussing why those were written differently in many newspapers. I was criticized by one senior faculty member for “spending too much time” on that subject.
Well, how much time should be devoted to examples which might raise questions about such matters as accuracy, possible links and/or adherence to governmental policy (through the newsgathering process involving licensed, regulated agents like funeral practitioners), legal issues when mentioning a fact might be considered an embarassment to legally-recognized survivors, etc? When we have the opportunity, during the normal course of teaching students how to construct the most basic of mundane reports in a newspaper, we are expected to overlook those things which might point to critical-thinking issues, even when students are savvy enough to question real policy. So instead of giving students a greater opportunity to recognize the limitations and differences among media outlets in their treatment of gay issues, we just haul out the examples of Ellen DeGeneres in her “coming out” episode and mention the Advocate as “alternative” situations/publications.
In my mind, what is often considered the “other” is what gets shoved into the “diversity” class – and the presumptive understanding is that straight white male journalism is the “mainstream” which warrants a couple of dozen instructional courses to understand. If educators fail to find ways to include the experiences of all “others” in instruction of tools, theory, history, law, and philosophical courses, then we are just not doing our job. It is very easy to use examples of the treatment of any minority group in the press as a gateway to raise other issues for discussion, particularly a commitment to ethics, agendasetting, gatekeeping, and impressions of “mainstream” management about public attitudes.
A few years ago, I asked a department editor for a major daily newspaper what he felt was most lacking in journalism education. His response was an observation that newspapers receive an amazing number of new graduates and interns without any critical thinking skills. If we are incapable of teaching those in conjunction with even the most basic tools courses, we aren’t creating new journalists – we are creating a more sophisticated class of stenographers.