Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Only Everyday Heroes 4/13

I saw this article on Yahoo! a couple months ago and when I saw the headline said Mississippi and gay marriage I assume it would be another ignorant Fox "News" type story.  Instead I was astonished to see a rural Mississippi newspaper taking a stand in support of gay marriage.

I just love the editor's response to all his bigoted readers who called in to complain about the story.  Way to stand your ground!  Those kind of journalistic principles definitely make you an Everyday Hero (though I suspect soon also unemployed).

A newspaper in rural Mississippi is defending its decision to run a cover story on what it called the first same-sex marriage in the county it serves.

On Feb. 7, the Laurel Leader-Call published the story Historic Wedding: Women wed in Laurel through smiles, tears about the wedding of Jessica Powell and Crystal Craven. Craven has been battling brain cancer. The women exchanged vows earlier this month at a ceremony in Laurel, Miss., attended by family, friends and Craven's doctors.

"If chemo doesn't work, we don't know what happens after that," Craven told the paper.
"This is true love," Powell said. "Love is love, it knows no gender."
She added: "I don't remember voting on straight marriage, so why is gay marriage an issue?"
The story sparked a backlash among readers in a state that does not legally recognize same-sex marriage.

"We shouldn't have to defend every decision we make here at the Leader-Call," Jim Cegielski, the paper's owner, wrote in an editorial published on Saturday. "However, the intense reaction to our gay wedding front page story, which led to a deluge of hate calls, letters, e-mails, Facebook posts, soundoffs and random cross stares thrown in my direction, warrants some sort of response. So here it is."

Cegielski continued:
We were well aware that the majority of people in Jones County are not in favor of gay marriage. However, any decent newspaper with a backbone can not base decisions on whether to cover a story based on whether the story will make people angry.
The job of a community newspaper is not pretending something didn't take place or ignoring it because it will upset people. No, our job is to inform readers what is going on in our town and let them make their own judgments. That is exactly what we did with the wedding story. Our reporter heard about the wedding, attended it, interviewed some of the participants and wrote a news story. If there had been protestors at the wedding, we would have covered that the exact same way … but there weren't any. We never said it was a good thing or a bad thing, we simply did our job by telling people what took place.
I took the bulk of the irate phone calls from people who called the paper to complain. Most of the complaints seem to revolve around the headline, "Historic Wedding," and the fact that we chose to put the story on the front page. My answer to the "Historic Wedding" headline is pretty simple. You don't have like something [for it] to be historic.
The holocaust, bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Black Sox scandal are all historic. I'm in no way comparing the downtown wedding of two females to any of those events, even though some of you made it quite clear that you think gay marriage is much worse.

We have stories about child molesters, murders and all kinds of vicious, barbaric acts of evil committed by heinous criminals on our front page and yet we never receive a call from anyone saying 'I don't need my children reading this.' Never. Ever. However, a story about two women exchanging marriage vows and we get swamped with people worried about their children.
I had at least 20 or so readers express to me they think gay marriage is "an abomination against God." We never said it wasn't. We never said it was.
We were simply reporting to the best of our ability. However, I can't help but be saddened by the hate-filled viciousness of many of the comments directed toward our staff … No one here deserves to be berated or yelled at simply because we were doing our job.
[Fifteen readers cancelled their subscriptions in protest, according to the Cegielski.]
You have every right to cancel your subscription. But you have no right to berate and belittle anyone on our staff.
 I really wish we had more newspapers who had balls like that.

5 comments:

Michael Offutt, Phantom Reader said...

Thanks for posting this. I'll give it a tweet. I don't understand why people fear gays getting married. It truly does baffle me. All I can come up with is that people think being gay is a lifestyle choice, and I can speak from experience, that this is in no way a choice. I would never choose to be an outcast any more than a person with black skin says "I chose to be black."

stephen Hayes said...

Your choice for Everyday Heroes is well chosen. Someone was exhibiting a Profile in Courage.

Andrew Leon said...

That's awesome.

And I kind of love the way you're doing the A-to-Z thing without doing the A-to-Z thing.

Lowandslow said...

Imagine that....a REAL journalist. They don't MAKE the news, they just print it.

Excellent post PT.

S

Briane said...

That was an excellent Everyday Hero. I love the part about how nobody ever calls to complain about child molester news. I hope this guy gets a better job when he gets fired.

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