WOODSTOCK TIMES
26 March 2004
Gay fireworks
Local journalist dismissed as New York Times stringer
by Andrea Barrist Stern
High Falls journalist Jay Blotcher is used to seeing his name in the
bylines of articles he has written for publications as diverse as Ulster
Publishing's Alm@nac, The New York Times, Chronogram, and Gay City News,
among others. More recently, however, Blotcher has found himself the
subject of media stories in The Washington Post, The Village Voice, The
Nation, and The Daily News as well as other papers and numerous Internet
blogs.
After filing three-bylined articles and contributing to several others for
The New York Times during past few years, Blotcher was notified by his
editor at the paper's Metropolitan desk, Lew Serviss, that The Times would
no longer use his services as a stringer because of his past association
with ACT UP, a gay rights organization founded in 1987 in New York City.
After pressing the paper's editors, Blotcher says he was told that he was
being dismissed because he had served as a spokesperson for ACT UP from
April 1989 to January 1990. (In 1997, he also did a press release for the
organization for its tenth anniversary.) His services for ACT UP were in a
volunteer capacity as was the similar public relations work he did for
another gay organization, Queer Nation, from April 1990 to January 1991.
(For about five years, beginning in 1995, Blotcher was also a paid
publicist for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, AmFAR.)
Blotcher does not dispute his past association with these organizations,
but he and national leaders of the gay community, who have rallied to his
defense, are questioning why the writer's past gay activism precludes his
writing for other departments at The New York Times, where Blotcher can no
longer contribute pieces either.
"As someone who has been an activist in the past and does know his civil
rights, I thought there was something chilling about this," he says of his
initial reaction after being informed by Serviss that The Times no longer
planned to used him. "A friend of mine there used to go door to door
campaigning for a City Council member who was running for state senator
while he was writing for The Times. Another guy I know had worked as a
[spokesperson] for several civil rights organizations at the same time
that I represented ACT UP."
In an e-mailed response to the Woodstock Times on Tuesday, Catherine Mathis,
vice president of corporate communication for The New York Times Company,
wrote, "While Blotcher's formal involvement with ACT UP ended some ten years
ago, he continued - by his own account and by the evidence of Nexis - to
assume a role as advocate and spokesperson. He has written very little for
The Times, but at least one of his pieces was about a gay issue."
Mathis is referring to a March 12, 2000, bylined piece that the journalist
filed with the newspaper about a new publication at the time that was
geared to elderly gay and lesbian readers. (His other bylined articles
were for the Metropolitan desk: a December 12, 2003, piece about a
Sullivan County resident accused of killing three of her infants, and a
November 10, 2003, article about vandalism at Sullivan County Community
College.)
Mathis referred the Woodstock Times to a recent e-mail that New York Times
executive editor Bill Keller had sent to Larry Kramer, the founder of ACT
UP and a well-known gay activist, in response to a letter from Kramer to
Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., about a month ago. "As you
undoubtedly know, this paper went through some misery last year that has
caused us to undertake a conscientious review of our standards and
practices," wrote Keller, referring to the Jason Blair scandal. "In
keeping with that, our new Metro editor began a review of our stringer
list to make sure our policies on conflicts of interest were in force. We
employ dozens of stringers at Metro - although 'employ' exaggerates the
nature of the relationship, since most of them work only occasionally. ...
In the review of the stringer list, Mr. Blotcher attracted attention not
because of his membership in anti-AIDS organizations, but because of his
work as a press spokesman and a public relations consultant. He was, for a
time, the public face of ACT UP. Although he is no longer in that role,
his work was recent enough that we worry he is identified in the public
mind as an advocate. (He is certainly remembered as such by editors and
reporters at The Times.) Please understand, I have no problem with Mr.
Blotcher working for ACT UP, and intend no suggestion that he is anything
but an honorable man. But we try to avoid employing people who are
identified with a cause, because it creates the possibility that readers
may wonder if their copy is written in pursuit of that cause. That would
be true if he had been a spokesman for the NRA, the NRDC, or the AARP..."
Nowhere in the recent responses of the editors and spokespersons at The
Times to questions posed by other publications and gay activist leaders
has the paper clarified why Blotcher's past association with a gay rights
organization would preclude him from covering other subjects for the
newspaper. At a time when the rights of gay and lesbian Americans are
making headlines in terms of same-sex marriage, Blotcher and his
supporters say they are at a loss to explain The Times' decision.
Even within The Times, Steve Reed, who heads the paper's Gay and Lesbian
Caucus, notes there is disagreement within the group that has about 50
members. "There is definitely a diversity of opinion over this," says
Reed, an editor for The New York Times Regional Newspaper Group, which has
its offices in the same building but on a different floor from the
newspaper. "Some people feel comfortable with what the editors did and
some don't." Reed says he has "not done a formal poll" and has only heard
from about ten percent of the caucus's members. Opinion appears to be
split 50/50, he notes. Is the paper's own code of ethics applied equally
across the board? "That's something I wouldn't want to go into," he says,
referring further questions to Mathis.
Blotcher and his supporters within the gay community have questioned
whether The Times' early coverage of the AIDS pandemic - coverage they say
came under criticism from ACT UP and other gay rights organizations for
being inadequate and spotty - could have been behind the newspaper's
decision to dismiss the journalist. Blotcher says Kramer's book, Reports
From the Holocaust: The Story of An AIDS Activist (St. Martin's Press)
documents how The Times gave the AIDS epidemic only a fraction of the
coverage it gave to legionnaire's disease during the early 1980s.
"The implications of The New York Times muffling this amounted to a life
or death crisis," says Blotcher. "Critical years were lost." He and other
gay activists agree, however, that the paper's more recent coverage of
both AIDS and gay issues has been exemplary.
"The Times, like every other news organization, was very much behind in
seeing the danger," says Virginia Apuzzo, a Kingston area resident and the
former assistant to President Bill Clinton for management and
administration. The highest ranking out gay member of Clinton's
administration, Apuzzo was the former head of the National Gay and Lesbian
Task Force (before "lesbian" was part of its name). As one of a small
group of vocal gay activists, she took on The New York Times and got the
paper to agree to begin using the term "gay." But even Apuzzo doubts the
recent decision has anything to do with still bruised feelings at The
Times regarding past criticism of their AIDS coverage.
Blotcher's story, as they say in the business, has had "legs," especially
after Eric Alterman, who writes the "Stop the Presses" media column for
The Nation did a piece in the first week of March. Michael Petrelis, a gay
activist known for his fiery tactics, posted a letter in support of
Blotcher on The New York Times' Internet forum (public@nytimes.com) but
the letter was reportedly taken off the forum a day later with Petrelis
receiving a reply from the paper saying it was investigating the matter.
The gay community has argued that Blotcher is being singled out for some
unknown reason and the paper is not applying its standards equally.
Lawrence Altman, a medical correspondent for The New York Times is a
former employee of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
yet he regularly reports on that agency, according to a February 26 piece
in the Gay City News, which also notes that Altman sits on an advisory
board that administers a CDC fellowship program. (In her response to the
Woodstock Times, Mathis notes, "Larry Altman does not now hold and never
has held an advocacy position, and his professional/medical activities
have all been authorized by his editors. His current ones are consistent
with our January 2003 ethics rules.) Blotcher's supporters have also
pointed out that Bernard Weintraub covers Hollywood for the paper even
though his wife is a top executive at Sony Pictures.
"Even if one accepts the paper's argument that his only crime is a kind of
post-[Jason] Blair hyper-fastidiousness about appearances at the expense
of fairness to one of its stringers, the story cannot be allowed to die
there," wrote Alterman for The Nation, noting two editors at The Times
declined his "repeated invitations to delineate a consistent policy
regarding just which kinds of associations are allowed and which aren't."
Alterman further noted that, "...with the departure of Adam Moss to New
York magazine, The Times lacks a single person in a position of
significant editorial authority - or on the editorial board for that
matter - who is openly gay. As one longtime and loyal Times writer put it
to me, 'The problem is not homophobia; it's homo-ignorance.'"
Blotcher realizes "the door has shut" to him at The New York Times, but
the writer says, "I want to raise the issue so the paper has to answer for
its actions and not apply its code of ethics haphazardly."