Ken Melhman Gay? Yes, Probably, But So What?
The Times reports on the controversy over Bill Maher outing RNC chair Ken Melhman on Larry King Live.
(Whew. That was a very media-saturated sentence!)
In case you're not familiar with the episode, Maher appeared on Larry King and was talking about gay Republicans. There are a lot of them, he said, some of whom are very high up in the party. Like who? Larry King said, rather weirdly. Ken Melhman, Maher replied. Everyone in Washington knows this.
(Incidentally, I've been calling this one for years. I have pretty good gaydar for a straight guy, and I remember seeing Melhman give a talk at the Kennedy School around three years ago, and after about 20 minutes of his talk, all of a sudden a light bulb went off and I thought, "Holy cow, the chairman of the Republican party is gay!" Can't remember what it was that tipped me off, though I remember thinking,
Gee, if you were a gay man and you had to be in the closet because you were the chairman of the Republican Party, this is exactly what you would look like....)
Well, the show was live on the East Coast, so that comment got aired. But when LKL was re-broadcast on the West Coast, they edited out the suggestion that Melhman is gay.
(You can see the unedited video here; thank God for blogs.)
Here's how the Times handled it:
Mr. Maher then began to speculate on the sexual orientation of some high-ranking Republican officials, and Mr. King, seeming to forget that he was on the air, asked for names. The comments were broadcast live, but CNN’s rebroadcast of the show later that evening cut a portion of Mr. Maher’s remarks.
In other words, on a story about how CNN censored something, the New York Times censored the exact same thing.
How weird is that?
The Times explained CNN's decision thusly:
In an e-mail statement, a spokeswoman for “Larry King Live” and CNN said that while the network was not responsible for Mr. Maher’s initial comments, it could be held responsible for republishing them without further research — a cautious interpretation of the law. “When someone says something potentially defamatory that we don’t expect them to say live on the air, we typically won’t be liable for it,” she said. “However, if we continue to rebroadcast it, without any reporting of our own or any comment from the subject of the accusation, we could be legally responsible for what that guest said.”
Oh, bullshit.
Haven't we moved past the time when to be called gay is considered "potentially defamatory"? I think we have. And this, as I sometimes say to various editors, this is the kind of lawsuit you'd love to have someone bring against you. The chairman of the Republican National Party sues CNN for the fact that one of its guests said he's gay? Brilliant. I'd pay good money to see that.
It's a lawsuit that would never happen, and CNN knows that.
Now, of course, outing people is highly problematic. I'd argue that if the chairman of a political party which promotes anti-gay bigotry is himself gay, that's newsworthy, and I'd run it. Though I'm not so sure that I'd just have it blurted out on talk show; there's a more responsible way to do such a piece.
Others could easily disagree, and make a good case not to run with such a story.
But if you don't want to out someone, can we just agree that it's because some people don't want to come out of the closet and the media respects their right to privacy, rather than saying that it's defamatory to say someone is gay?
Such a statement makes CNN complicit in bigotry. And if only for the reason that CNN anchor Anderson Cooper is gay, the network should know better.
