Fellow NLGJA blogger Michael Triplett has done an amazing wrap up of this past weekend’s events, including instant reaction to President Obama’s speech to the Human Rights Campaign and how the media covered the National Equality March.
In Michael’s post about coverage of the march, he ends with the following point:
The next time someone mentions a liberal bias or a pro-gay bias in the news, it’s worthwhile to think about how this story was played by the major U.S. news outlets.
I couldn’t agree with him more, especially with what I saw on C-SPAN.
My boyfriend and I were in DC for the weekend. I spoke at the HIV/AIDS rally and vigil the night before the march. We marched up to the Capital, saw the first few speeches and had to leave. We went back to the hotel and caught a few more speeches before driving back up to New York City.
C-SPAN captioned the event: Gay Rights Rally. The event organizers titled it the National Equality March, so why didn’t C-SPAN use that phrase?
I’ll concede that “Gay Rights Rally” is perhaps a bit more descriptive to a general audience, but it is certainly not any shorter.
As evidenced by C-SPAN itself, the words “National Equality March” could have fit just fine within the space allotted.
This event was a civil rights march advocating for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, not just gay people and not just “gay rights” (whatever those are).
To have “gay rights rally” constantly flashing before the eyes of viewers for hours on end does not completely cross the line to unfair or inaccurate, but for me it is uncomfortably close to the edge.