Shooting the Messenger

A “witch hunt.” That’s what Idaho senator Larry Craig called the months-long investigation by his hometown paper into rumors of his sexual encounters with men, published August 28 when news broke that the Republican pleaded guilty in connection with an airport sex sting. Eleven days earlier, allies of entertainment legend Merv Griffin were leveling similar charges at The Hollywood Reporter for running a piece that dared to say the talk-show host and Jeopardy! creator, who died August 12, was gay. But in both cases, the journalists behind the controversial stories say they were just doing their jobs.

“I think we were measured, fair, cautious,” Dan Popkey, the Idaho Statesman reporter on the Craig story, said on MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews. “We didn’t go with this story, like you guys did, in October” -- when allegations about the senator’s sexuality first surfaced on a blog -- “so for him to, you know, accuse us of conducting a witch hunt, that hurts a little, I suppose, but I think we got it right.”

Instead of going with the story last fall, Popkey spent months reporting it, researching and interviewing numerous sources to find out if the rumors were true. The story was in a holding pattern until the Washington, D.C., Capitol Hill paper Roll Call broke the news of Craig’s arrest and plea, which gave Popkey and his editors the final piece of evidence needed to go forward.

The veteran reporter became the center of intense media attention that he “could not have anticipated,” he tells The Advocate, since he started out writing a story he assumed would be of mainly local interest. Scrutiny from the likes of CNN and MSNBC was not a scenario Popkey had envisioned, especially when national news organizations asked him to defend his reporting. “It was my first glimpse at how national media operates with your little state and your little story,” Popkey says.

In the case of Griffin, the furor was sparked by well-regarded columnist Ray Richmond’s August 17 piece in the entertainment trade publication The Hollywood Reporter, which opened with the words, “Merv Griffin was gay. Why should that be so uncomfortable to read?” Richmond went on to write that he worked for Griffin in the 1980s, when he learned that the entertainer’s sexuality was an open secret, and he referenced two palimony suits brought by men -- facts that some obituaries ignored. He also discussed the power of the closet in Hollywood today and how little has changed for gay performers since the days of Merv’s youth.

The swift response to Richmond’s column certainly seemed to demonstrate that thesis. A few hours after it was published both in the magazine’s print edition and online, it was removed from the Reporter’s Web site (it was posted again later), while the news service Reuters, which had picked up the story, dropped it from its entertainment feed. Richmond got some nasty e-mails accusing him of being sensationalist, self-serving, and having a gay agenda, and the Reporter had at least one ad pulled over the story. It didn’t help that the column ran on the day of Griffin’s burial, which Richmond says was accidental.

“My whole take on this was, this was a media social experiment,” Richmond says. “It wasn’t about outing somebody. It was, Can we talk about this without oh-my-God-ing? The answer is, Probably not.” The point of discussing Griffin’s sexuality, he adds, was to ask “Why does it have to be this huge, shameful identifier? I’d like to think we are further along.”

Ted Johnson, managing editor for Reporter rival Variety who helms that publication’s entertainment-and-politics blog Wilshire & Washington, says the Griffin and Craig stories are “two different things.”

“Merv was not out there talking about gay issues,” Johnson says, noting that while Griffin was believed to hold personally conservative political views, he was never considered “overtly political,” a position that made sense, since he interviewed a wide range of political figures in his career.

But Johnson concedes that Richmond’s column wasn’t that groundbreaking for Hollywood, considering its subject was dead. “It would be different if it was a column about someone who was living,” he says.

The reticence to discuss sexuality and the negative reaction to both the Griffin and Craig stories, Richmond says, is simply based on fear: “There’s a fear that Middle America is not going to be accepting, and maybe they are right. But maybe Middle America needs to be more accepting.”

Given the chance to do the column again, Richmond says, he would write it exactly the same way. “I don’t have any regrets. Usually I have huge regrets. This is a huge anomaly.”