Finally, there was the eagerness of various Republican presidential hopefuls — competing in the party’s most fluid nominating process in decades — to endear themselves to the GOP’s base by condemning Craig’s bathroom behavior. So it was that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney — a self-styled champion of “traditional values” and inveterate gay-marriage basher who had tapped Craig as his Senate campaign co-chair — pulled an endorsement from Craig off his campaign Web site, deleted Craig’s name from campaign press releases, and, for good measure, rushed to condemn Craig’s behavior to any political journalist who was willing to listen — or so it seemed.
Given all these contingencies, the Craig Affair only goes so far as a model for how stories develop in the 21st century. But there is a bigger lesson here — namely, the extent to which private sexual behavior (or, more precisely, a certain type of private sexual behavior) has come to be regarded as legitimate news fodder.
After all, the Statesman’s investigation was prompted by an October 2006 post by Mike Rogers, whose blog, BlogActive.com, is dedicated to outing politicians who oppose gay rights. (In November 2006, Rogers explained his approach to the Phoenix; with some exceptions, he believes that closeted anti-gay politicians are inherently newsworthy.) Unlike other Idaho dailies, the Statesman wasn’t comfortable reporting on Rogers’s outing of Craig — which was based on anonymous sources — when it first occurred. But it did decide that Rogers’ report contained the germ of a legitimate news story. And while the Statesman wasn’t comfortable publishing its own investigation prior to Roll Call’s scoop, it was perfectly willing to do so afterward.
There is, of course, a major difference between an allegation and an admission, which is exactly what Craig provided back in June, even though he’s now changed his tune. Still, Rogers and the Statesman — an activist blogger and a mainstream daily, respectively — seem to share a broader agreement on the newsworthiness of Craig’s private sexual behavior.
For those of us who consider ourselves social liberals, this might seem like cause for celebration: we’re confident that anti-gay politics are predicated on ignorance; that it’s hard to be homophobic when you actually know gays and lesbians; that Larry Craig’s imprudent choice of venue was the problem, not his desire to have sex with another man. The problem is this: not everyone is going to respond to the Larry Craig story the way we did. For every social liberal who concludes that the Craig Affair undermines homophobia, there’s a social conservative who’ll take the opposite tack — who’ll see Craig as proof that homosexuality is something disgusting and perfidious. And the avalanche of press coverage fed the second attitude just as much as the first.
Admittedly, the mainstream media’s embrace of Mike Rogers’s line of thinking is still incomplete. For example, Susan Ryan-Vollmar, editor of Bay Windows, a Boston gay-and-lesbian weekly, notes that neither the Times nor the Washington Post emphasized the personal-hypocrisy angle — Rogers’s raison d’etre — in their initial reportage. She also notes that the Statesman, despite obtaining plenty of evidence that Craig had indeed had sex with men, waited to publish its report until after Roll Call’s scoop. “It shows just how afraid the mainstream media is to out somebody,” she argues.
