Newsroom Boss Candid about TV's Struggle to Cover Race & LGBTQ+ Issues

Out of the more than 5,000 connections on LinkedIn and the hundreds of subscribers to this newsletter, only one person raised their hand to offer their perspective during Pride Month on what they’ve experienced as a queer person in U.S. newsrooms.

I would submit that tells us something about the dangers of being an “out journalist” at the local level, even in 2023, as well as outing newsroom microaggressions and troublesome coverage choices.

But Alex Walker, the one person who offered their perspective, tells me they just can’t stay quiet. Not when lives are on the line.

As a child growing-up in Detroit, Walker saw Bernard Shaw’s coverage of the First Gulf War on CNN and got hooked on journalism.

“I just was fascinated that there were people who looked like me that were all across the globe telling these really cool stories,” Walker recalled this week during an interview for the debut episode of the We’ve Got Issues podcast that’ll be released this fall. “And I wanted to be a part of that.”

At an early age, they could already see how local news could be better.

“I was in 4th grade and I was watching the 11 o'clock news and a story came on and it had a picture of my uncle,” Walker said. “And it was about how he had gotten shot on my grandmother's porch.”

They had been told about the shooting prior to the broadcast. The information was not a surprise. How it was handled, though, shocked even a 4th grader.

“But it was just like this 15 to 20-second reader on the local news,” Walker recalled. “And I was like, ‘This is a man with a full life. And a family. And a story.’ And I knew watching that, I knew what local news could do to connect people and impact their lives on a very granular level. And I didn’t want any other family members to feel like mine when similar stories were aired.”

Now it’s another family Walker is trying to protect, their extended LGBTQ+ family.

The Emmy-winning producer, who’s a veteran of newsrooms in Boston and DC, identifies as queer and nonbinary. They worry that superficial — or nonexistent — coverage of the LGBTQ+ community on local television news in many U.S. markets does nothing to address the dangers queer people face in our society.

Trans folks are 2.5 times more likely to be the victims of crimes as compared to cisgender people, according to an FBI study released last year.

Lesbians and gays are more than twice as likely to be crime victims as compared to straight people, the FBI study found.

“The lack of diversity in newsrooms, the lack of diversity among media decision-makers leads to a detriment when you have folks whose ideologies and their policies are discriminatory and bigoted,” Walker said. “And that's not hyperbole, that's not opinion. That is fact. That is truth.

“And we have to call a thing ‘a thing’ because these policies have real life consequences for marginalized people,” Walker added. “And the reason they're already marginalized is because they've already been put on the sidelines with society and ignored and getting less resources to begin with.”

Television crews love to show-up to school board meetings and city council sessions and get easy interviews with riled-up citizens. But people in marginalized communities aren’t able to get to those events because they’re often working multiple jobs, Walker pointed-out. Therefore, they’re not interviewed and their perspectives aren’t heard.

Walker is urging journalists to live in the communities they cover (not just rent an apartment near the station), get involved in community groups, and get to know educators in town.

“Befriend teachers,” Walker advised. “They have a wealth of knowledge and information, and they are more than happy to share that with you after a beer or two. They are great representations of community members because they see and hear everything because they are dealing with people's kids for eight, nine hours a day. They're dealing with the government because of funding and politics and regulations all day, and they also live there. It's like a microcosm.”

Journalists at WOOD-TV (NBC/Nexstar) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, were appalled last week when two newsroom managers urged them to reconsider Pride coverage. The station had gotten pushback from conservative viewers. Newsroom employees were told in a memo to “consider how to make the story balanced and get both sides of the issue.”

What was “unbalanced” about the station’s coverage wasn’t exactly spelled-out and neither was the “issue” those in charge proposed covering.

But it was easy to read between the lines.

Anchor Michele DeSelms wrote on Twitter, “Our newsroom immediately stood up to the 2 managers who wrote a memo mandating that we cover ‘the other side’ of Pride events: essentially requiring us to give equal time to hate and discrimination. We said no, and will continue to fight for our LGBTQ colleagues, family members.”

Back in 2003 — yes, 20 years ago — Leroy Aarons, the trailblazing founder of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA), was dealing with many of the same issues.

(Aarons was a hell of a journalist in his own right and had an amazing career. Aarons recalled he was the person who told presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy about the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., only to cover Kennedy’s funeral two months later, after an assassin struck him down, too, according to the Washington Post.)

Aarons was dismayed in the early 2000s, like Walker is today, about the lack of news coverage exploring issues affecting grassroots members of the LGBTQ+ community.

“If it doesn’t have a sizzle, celebrity, or a dramatic angle it doesn’t get printed,” Aarons told Poynter at the time. “It’s the digging, enterprising stuff that’s missing.”

To give you some perspective on where we were in pop culture history at the time, Ellen DeGeneres would begin hosting her talk show in the months following Aarons’ interview with Poynter. And 2003 was also the year the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy debuted on Bravo.

Poynter’s story notes that in 2000, Aarons and co-researcher Sheila Murphy surveyed “363 print and broadcast gay and lesbian journalists,” the vast majority of whom were disappointed by local coverage. “When it comes to the local coverage of the lives of gay men,” Poynter’s story said, “only 20 percent said coverage was good-to-excellent and only 12 percent say that coverage of the lives of lesbians is in that range.”

Two things are striking to me:

The media invisibility of trans folks in 2003, even in coverage of an issue like this.

And, overall, how far we have not come.

Alex Walker is taking their talents to the West Coast later this summer, as they rise to a managing editor/assistant news director role. Their new colleagues won’t be the only ones benefiting from Alex’s wisdom and guidance. They will be the very first guest on the We’ve Got Issues podcast, debuting in September. You can also hear Alex’s excellent reportorial, research, and hosting skills showcasing how people of color are finding ways to heal from traumas caused by racism on their podcast, Psychological Injury: Exploring Racial Trauma. They’ve given the project such care, each episode sounds like an NPR production. You can hear Alex’s four-episode series just about everywhere, including YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.