"20/20" and MATTHEW SHEPARD

I just watched tonight's broadcast of ABC's one-hour "20/20" special devoted to what the network had blatantly overhyped as its "revelations" about the murder, and the murderers, of Matthew Shephard. Most of what was served up on-screen wasn't terribly new: it had all been in print somewhere before, or figured in evidence at the trial. Only the self-serving interviews with the two admitted killers--squirming away from the accusations of anti-gay bias--were truly new.

The expensively-coiffed airhead Elizabeth Vargas is no Mike Wallace. Her doe-eyed questioning never really confronted the killers with the contradictions between their latest version of events and the one offered up by their lawyers at their trial--the "homosexual panic" defense that said they were justified in the violence of their assault on Shepard because he'd made advances to one of them. Oh, this defense was mentioned (although never really explained), and Vargas allowed one of the killers to say it was only an invention of convenience cooked up with his lawyer. But none of the extensive accounts presented at trial as part of this defense were mentioned, nor were any legal or psychiatric authorities on "gay panic" asked to comment or dissect the murderers' equivocations.

Nor did Vargas and her producers display any critical distance from, or skepticism about,  the on-camera revisionisms of their Wyoming interviewees--six years after the facts. All Wyoming wishes to be rid of the memory of what happened to Shepard, and to erase the national image of the state as anti-gay--it is, among other things, bad for business. But the absence of non-Wyoming expertise (except for one L.A. doctor's brief clip in which he offered the rather obvious thought that crystal meth can make you crazed) left any more objective assessment of the interviewees' claims up to the viewers, without providing them the informational tools or critical screen necessary to filtering out the valid from the invalid, the more-or-less true from the more-or-less false. The "20/20" Shepard report didn't have much more perspicacity or burrow much deeper than your average National Enquirer expose.

Vargas and her scriptwriters left the impression that Laramie residents' filmed statements now claiming one of the killers was bi-sexual somehow eradicated the possibility that homo-hate could have played a role in the murder of Shepard. That suggestion is, of course, utter nonsense: we have known for three decades that fear of, or socially induced hatred of, any degree of same-sex attraction a gay-basher may feel --a smothered desire sometimes acted upon, sometimes not--is a critical, common component of the makeup of young gaybashers. This was the finding of the first major study of gay-bashing youth conducted in the 1970s by the noted sexologist Dr. John Money, head of Johns Hopkins' Gender Identity Institute, and has been borne out by a number of studies since. But ABC went out of its way not to explore the complicated and convoluted origins of homophobia with anyone who had actually studied it.

The program's worst omission, however, was its failure to breath even a hint that violence against those who love differently from the average heterosexual is a daily occurrence in a country drowning in a host of religious superstitions that justify it. For example, there was not any mention of the new FBI report released November 22, which shows that bias violence against gays is now the second most important category of hate-crimes in the U.S., after race. A more thoughtful brand of journalism that wanted to make a serious effort to understand the problem of homohate and the role it played (or didn't) in Shepard's murder might have found the FBI's findings about the new wave of anti-gay violence worthy of mention. Not ABC. Nor did the network think to contact the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs--the alliance linking gay-run AVPs in the various states--which recorded a country-wide 26% increase in violent attacks on gays in just one year by the end of 2003.

And now, Shepard's parents have accused ABC of "selective editing" to make it appear they agreed with the program's theses--deliberately leaving out facts that contradicted the Vargas version, and similarly distorting interviews with two local law enforcement officials.

Most killings have complex and convoluted causes. But the "20/20" report on Matthew Shepard was a piece of sloppy and shallow, incomplete and mindlessly sensationalist, over-promoted ratings fodder that added little to a real understanding of why Shepard was so horribly brutalized and murdered--or to how future assaults might be prevented.

For a serious exploration of the meaning of the Shepard case, I heartily recommend the first-hand, September 1999 report from Laramie for Harper's magazine by my old friend JoAnn Wypijewski. Her eagle-eyed, elegant, thought-provoking article contains many of the claims ABC presented as "new." And the single most intelligent, nuanced piece I've seen on the "20/20" Shepard broadcast was by the excellent Michael Bronski in this week's Boston Phoenix. (By the way, if you've never read Bronski's fine book, The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom, take this opportunity to do so--it has a lot of relevance to understanding both the issues raised by the Shepard case and ABC's botched sensationalism about it).

And, if you'd like to contact ABC to let them know what you think about their Shepard program, here is contact information:

1) David Westin, President ABC News
David.L.Westin@abc.com

2) David Sloan, Executive Producer, 20/20
David.Sloan@abc.com

3) ABC News Exec Mark Foley
Phone: 800-221-7386 ext. 2252
Pager: 800-465-9498

4) 20/20 general contact:
2020@abc.com

5) ABC Television
77 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023
(212) 456-7777

Contacting your local ABC affiliate is an excellent idea.
LOCAL ABC Affliate Info:
Phone Numbers, Addresses, Websites, E Mail Links
http://abc.go.com/site/localstations.html