Many people who either don’t know any lesbian, gay or transgender people or don’t realize that they do, have just one set of windows onto our community, and that’s through the lens of the media. Some media outlets, such as tabloid journalism and television talk shows, are likely to give readers and viewers a skewed view of GLBTs. But what about more mainstream and local media outlets – our local television and radio stations and print outlets?

In other words, how do we fare in local media?

We went in search of members of the local gay and lesbian journalism community to get their scores on our city’s local media, and to find out whether they really feel – working from the inside – that our city’s reputation for conservatism is reflected in the way that local media covers GLBT issues.

Jason Sillman is an assignment editor and researcher at the local WB affiliate, KSWB-TV 5/69. When it comes to local news coverage and our city’s conservative reputation, Sillman puts it bluntly: “In San Diego, you have some television and radio stations that will cover the gay community and some that won’t. San Diego is a conservative city. So some stations are afraid to tackle the issues that confront the gay community.”

But in most cases, Sillman believes, this lack of coverage of GLBT issues and events isn’t a reflection of conscious decisions on the basis of owners, producers or editors’ biases; rather, it is driven by a fear of reaction or backlash.

“It’s the community at large that causes them to tackle the issues that confront the gay community,” he says. “A lot of the older stations try to stay away from gay issues [for this reason] but that’s not what news is. There could be more coverage of our community.”

Leng Loh, a producer for KPBS Television’s “Full Focus”, a nightly news and current events program, believes that the overall quality of coverage regarding the GLBT community in local media outlets varies. Of the Union-Tribune, Loh says: “All things considered, it’s not that bad. San Diego is a conservative town, it’s a conservative newspaper and it’s the only big paper in San Diego.” However, Loh sees a definite conservative bias in the editorial stance of the paper. “I don’t read the editorial page [of the Union-Tribune] because it skews more conservative,” she says. Also, Loh said that on occasion she’s noticed that troubling “wording slips through”, though not necessarily biased reporting. One instance of this: “A couple of months ago,” Loh says, “the paper reported that a woman tried to kill her husband with her ‘lesbian lover’. If it had been a man, they would have just said ‘boyfriend’. It’s one of those things that just slip through.”

Loh says she also sometimes sees the same problems in broadcast media, but she points to the nature of television as the reason for this. “Television is all about sound bites and flashy pictures to get the audience to pay attention,” says Loh. “Fortunately for me, I don’t work in that field [commercial television]. It’s audience driven and sometimes that leads to the lower common denominator.”

Loh adds that she doesn’t want to be too critical of television coverage for just these reasons. “Before I ended up in daily television, I was more critical of the way issues in general are covered,” she says. As a producer for public television, Loh says she has the ability to spend much more time on issues of all sorts, including those affecting the GLBT community.

That things sometimes slip through, both in print journalism and broadcast reporting, is a problem of time and space constraints, says David Poller, metro photo editor at the Union-Tribune and president of the San Diego chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA).

“Sometimes [when watching television] I think that’s a good story, that’s a good approach. … But other times they just use shorthand – this amounts to injecting fallacies into their reporting.” But Poller doesn’t believe this shorthand is a result of any inherent bias, either. Instead he thinks it’s a result of the great time constraints involved in broadcast journalism — and the parallel space constraints in print journalism — and the desire to have memorable, television-friendly lines.

“It’s a sort of laziness,” says Poller. “They are phrases that have gotten into the journalists’ heads.”

One example that comes to Poller’s mind is the currently common use of “gay marriage” rather than “same-sex marriage”. “I’m a gay man and I can get married; what I can’t do is marry someone of the same gender. Gay marriage is like a gay bookstore. Is that a bookstore that has sex with other bookstores of the same sex?”

But from his own experience with photo editing, Poller says, he knows where these phrases can come from. When the mayor of San Francisco first started issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, there were many pictures coming in on the AP wire, according to Poller. “I was overjoyed because of what was happening, but at the same time I saw that the slug assignment [the caption the wire service gives to the photos] was ‘gay marriage’. I thought, ‘gay marriage’ — that will be the phrase that every journalist will stick with.”

So, according to Poller, when news outlets let things slip, they are often just repackaging wording that has been handed to them by wire news services, without rethinking the wording themselves. “In the newsroom, when we’re making decisions about what to say, we’re also being told what to say, what words to use [by the wire].”

Rex Wockner, a San Diego-based, syndicated writer of a weekly international GLBT news roundup, as well as the weekly opinion column “The Wockner Wire” (published in Update and nationally) and the biweekly “Quote Unquote” (published in the Gay & Lesbian Times) agrees that the editorial page of the Union-Tribune has some way to go in its consideration of community issues, even as the news coverage has improved.

“The Union-Tribune has gotten to the point where it’s doing pretty well,” says Wockner. “They’re good at picking up from the AP. But enterprising local reporting still has a way to go.” Wockner echoes Loh’s comments on our daily newspaper’s editorial stance, however. “The editorial board at the U-T and in particular the unsigned editorials don’t quite get it yet.”

Sillman also sees problems with the Union-Tribune, but thinks this is a reflection of the broader San Diego community. “I think that the U-T is very opinionated. The Union-Tribune reflects the community and watches what it says, and it has an older readership. They aren’t balanced.”

This bias is reflected, Sillman thinks, in its coverage of gay and lesbian events, such as Pride. “They cover other street fairs all the time, but only with Pride do they throw in coverage of people who are opposed to our lifestyle.”

Poller explains this apparent difference in coverage, according to the Union-Tribune’s editorial policy.

“There have been a lot of protests and rallies lately: pro-war, anti-war, whatever. Our guidelines are that if there are 10,0000 people at an event and only three counter-protesting, we do not give equal time to both. But once there are a significant number, then it’s incumbent on us to give them representative, but not always equal, coverage.”

Because there are differences in the way that the wider community reacts to Pride and other sorts of celebrations, according to Poller, there is an accompanying difference in coverage. “We’re grown-up enough that when there’s a Juneteenth celebration, no one protests. Unfortunately, we aren’t that grown-up about Pride.”

While there are some places in local media where the GLBT community doesn’t fare well, almost everyone thinks that progress has been made in media coverage, and that there are definite instances of good coverage of the community. In order to find out what other media outlets are covering and stay abreast of breaking stories, part of Sillman’s job at KSWB-TV is to listen to and monitor other media.

“If you listen to some of the morning radio shows you see that there’s no hatred,” Sillman says, referring to mainstream radio DJs outside of the realm of conservative talk radio’s Roger Hedgecock and Rick Roberts. “With the radio business in San Diego, I haven’t heard anything bad. In fact, a lot of the radio stations try to go out to Pride events, including stations like KSON, a country station.” He adds that he thinks his own employer does an excellent job in covering GLBT events. “We are the only station that goes to Pride with all its on-air talent.”

While KPBS’s Loh has been disturbed by some reactions to the topic of Pride on mainstream network news – “I’ve seen expressions of distaste on anchor’s faces” when discussing it, she says – she also thinks that some of the local coverage of same-sex marriage has been very good. Loh said she’s fortunate to be at KPBS, a public television outlet that can respond differently to pressures than commercial television.

“Because we have longer timelines, we can do more,” says Loh, pointing out that in the last nine months, “Full Focus” has covered same-sex marriage three times in three different ways, including interviews with politicians and a pro and con discussion with legal experts.

Rex Wockner also believes, guardedly, that when it comes to the Union-Tribune, some progress has been made.

“After Helen Copley gave the paper to her son, David, we have seen, for reasons many people understand, a diminishment in homo-cluelessness in the paper,” says Wockner, referring to local media’s elephant in the room – the decades-long rumor that Union-Tribune publisher David Copley is gay.

Poller notes that his colleagues at the Union-Tribune are tuned in to the important issues in the GLBT community. For instance, he’s not around the newspaper during Pride, since he considers it a holiday. “But I don’t have to tell my colleagues not just to focus on leather daddies and drag queens,” he says. “Among the most important stories during Pride this year are marriage. They need to look for people who have gotten married. But I don’t have to tell them this. They are a bunch of grownups who are good journalists and know what the important stories are; that there’s more that goes on than just a parade.”

Almost any member of our community who works in local media sees room for improvement in local coverage, often in terms of diversity and greater integration of community coverage into broader coverage.

Poller would like to see the media become more aware of differences in the GLBT community.

“There are more faces that aren’t seen in the media,” he says. “We aren’t all 20- to 30-somethings who live in Hillcrest. When something like the Gwen Araujo or Mathew Shepard murder happens, they always send a reporter to Hillcrest. I’d like to see the media be a little less myopic about who gays and lesbians are, where we live and what we look like.”

Similarly, Wockner and Loh both find a problem in the way in which the two sides of issues are presented in discussions of gay and lesbian issues and the GLBT community.

“In broadcast journalism, the two sides are painted as black and white; it’s very simplified,” says Wockner.

Loh agrees and believes that there’s an inherent prejudice in journalism toward the presentation of both sides of an issue, even when one side isn’t necessarily legitimate. In a recent forum about just these issues, Loh said, “one of the critiques that people who came to the forum had about public television and other coverage is that journalists believe that you have to do pro and con on every issue. … This approach is very stark. It’s always, ‘These people want it, those people don’t.’ It’s not a model that works for progressing forward as a society.”

What Loh really hopes for is that local media could look more like what she sees in the press in San Francisco.

“When I look at the San Francisco Chronicle, it’s integrated into the paper as a whole, not just Pride month,” she says, “not just when there’s a big political issue. It’s not relegated to a special section. I think all particular communities — whether Asian American, lesbian and gay, Hispanic, whatever — would prefer to be seen as part of the larger community.”

Considering what changes need to be made in local media, Sillman says: “We need to start acting like a big town in San Diego.”

In part, bringing about these sorts of changes is one of the goals of the NLGJA.

“All media in San Diego have the same problems,” says Poller. “There isn’t much difference. The depth and breadth of coverage could be better. One of the reasons I started this chapter was to provide an institutional voice to bring this about.”