The Huffington Post right now is blaring GAY MEDIA FUMING AT OBAMA.
Once you click on the link you get this:
The Philadelphia Gay News is hammering Barack Obama for what they say is his consistent refusal to speak to gay media outlets.
In its latest issue, the paper features a front-page interview with Hillary Clinton and a large blank space under a photo of Barack Obama, with a banner headline reading, "Clinton Talks, Obama Balks."
The paper's accompanying editorial states:
At this point in the Democratic presidential campaign, we're able to view the candidates by their actions. And we have found that Sen. Barack Obama would rather talk at the LGBT community than with them...
The fact is that Obama has spoken with the gay press only twice, and one of those interviews...was in 2004, before he became a U.S. senator. The other limited interview occurred after controversy erupted when his campaign added an anti-gay minister to his tour of the South. It has now been 1,522 days since Obama has been accessible to our community.
Somehow Ben Smith's blog is linking to that story and QUEERTY, an influential gay blog had picked up on the story first yesterday.
Except that this editorial is a hit job.
First it is obviously untrue Obama has not talked to the LGBT press. He has done plenty of interviews including a high-profile one to the Advocate a couple of months ago. (Does anybody know of any other local gay press interview ?).
The editor of the PGN is pissed he was not granted his own interview and is making this a huge deal and exagerates big time to make his point. The Queerty blog entry did point that out with a snarky comment at the end of the post but regular MSM journalists did not pick up on it.
And of course, beyond the parochial issue, one should add that the Philadelphia Gay News editor, Mark Segal, who wrote that editorial, is a Hillary Clinton donor.
(Check : http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/... - He gave $1000 in the first quarter of last year and is even listed under the occupation "Publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News").
That sort of puts his false outrage in perspective. But somehow the story gets picked up and the damage gets done.
I wrote to everyone I can. Andrew Belonsky, editor at Queerty, replied to me within half-an- hour that I was right and he would add those information to the entry. Kudos to him for that.
But the two other entries are still there as far as I can tell and we are risking this story being propagated without being corrected.
So if you are a commenter on Huffington Post please correct the report. Write the editors expressing outrage at them making this their current politics headline when the story is false on many fronts.
Beyond the obvious fact Obama is the most pro-gay candidate of the three remaining, we cannot let stupid misleading details like this derail our candidate. Politics on the Internet has to be a streetfight sometimes.
Help me correct the record !
UPDATE: Here is an interesting take on why Obama may have a problem with some people in the gay press.
http://citizenchris.typepad.com/...
Reporter Eric Resnick of the Gay People's Chronicle has posted an angry column complaining that he was mistreated by Barack Obama's campaign when he sought an interview with the Ohio gay newspaper. Resnick complained that the candidate was not made available for a one-on-one interview
(...)
Unfortunately, Resnick is a walking talking argument for why those publications often don't get the access they rightly deserve. Resnick acknowledges in his column that he was a vocal supporter of Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich's presidential campaign and was even elected as a Kucinich delegate to the Democratic National Convention.
(...)
Given Resnick's plain bias and his conduct more befitting an activist than a journalist, it's hardly surprising that he didn't get his interview with Obama. Why put the candidate in front of such a loose cannon who shows so little regard for the rules of journalism? I have a lot of respect for the Gay People's Chronicle, but the paper was was very poorly served by Resnick as a reporter.
Just compare on the one hand Resnick's report in the Gay People's Chron, which fixates on the New Jersey civil unions report and the issue of gay marriage -- even though Clinton and Obama agree on that point -- while making no mention of the fact that Clinton's position in favor of half-repeal of DOMA (which Resnick misstates) is different from Obama's support for full repeal.
Then, on the other hand, you have Editor Tammye Nash's more extensive and even-handed report in the Dallas Voice, which was based on exactly the same 15-minute phone call with Clinton.
Clinton should be credited for giving the interview, her second to the "free gay press," though I would note that her other "free gay press" interview was with Kevin Naff, the editor of the Washington Blade, who weeks earlier had endorsed Clinton for president in an editorial. I have enormous respect for the Blade and for Kevin, but he was the wrong person to do that interview as well.
UPDATE 2: I am so proud of myself ! Queerty did publish the correction http://www.queerty.com/... and Huffington Post published an update to their entry pointing out that 1000$ thingie.
See ? It was worth bitching ! Now when people Google it, they will read the correction :)