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The attention and prominence given to issues in media outlets may affect the importance citizens attribute to them, so the actors who influence mass media coverage decisions may have political power in society generally. This article seeks to measure the relative influence of journalists, social trends, events, government officials, editors, and owners on the New York Times coverage of lesbians and gays from 1960 to 1995. Although many factors affected the nature and frequency of such coverage, the findings of this article show that the owners of the Times exerted decisive influence. Documentary evidence reveals that the Times' owners actively intervened to suppress coverage of lesbians and gays until 1987, even as reporters and editors recognized that increased social visibility made them newsworthy. Statistical analysis confirms that, although some actual events and statements of officials attracted attention from the newspaper throughout the period, they were more likely to generate prominent coverage after 1987 when the stories were consistent with the enthusiasms of the owners.
Notes
1. Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger (IOS) to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger February 5, 1966 (IOS file, Box 8, Turner Catledge papers, Mississippi State University). Also, see Alwood (1996).
2. Turner Catledge to Iphegene Ochs Sulzberger February 9, 1966.
3. Because of changes in usage and meaning, additional searches using the word “gay” produced large numbers of unrelated hits for the early years of our time period, mostly referring to festive occasions (“gay toasts” on New Year's Eve January 1, 1960; and a “gay holiday mood” on Easter Sunday April 18, 1960), happy people, and occasionally places. Accra was a “gay and jostling tropical capital” (October 17, 1960), but Havana was no longer the “gay and cosmopolitan” city it had been before the Cuban revolution (June 12, 1961).
4. Stonewall was an apparent exception to recent findings that the news media are more likely to cover civil disturbances that occur in close proximity to news institutions, their reporters, and their readers (Myers & Caniglia, 2004)
5. Despite the fact that there was evidence of potential over-dispersion in the data (as manifested in the fact that the standard deviation was larger than the conditional mean), we used a Poisson probability distribution as the basis of the maximum likelihood estimation. This choice occurred because the apparent over-dispersion in the data appeared to be related to an excess of zero articles (see Long, 1997, pp. 242–250)—a consequence that we return to later in the article when we use a zero-inflated Poisson model to consider the possibility that this apparent excess of zero articles occurs as a direct result of the influence of owners.
6. Time is obviously an implicit component of the dependent variable, which is, after all, the number of articles in each month at a single source. However, we do not use a time series model for theoretical and statistical reasons. The selection of events deserving of newspaper coverage are thought to treat each time period as discrete and independent, literally reporting the events of the day. Consistent with this idea, there is no evidence that, conditional on the independent variables, time was a factor that required consideration in this model. Time was incorporated in the distribution of events that were either (a) randomly distributed (as implied by newspapers treating each time period as discrete and independent) and, therefore, captured in the stochastic nature of the residual without impact on the model, or (b) their occurrence related to factors already incorporated in this model, including the changing public view on lesbian and gays appearing in the media, the visibility of lesbian and gay individuals, and more important, changing ownership and editorial leadership at the New York Times itself. As we note later in this article, the definition of what are events is itself often shaped by these same factors. Thus, we could clearly state that what was previously published on the front page did not shape subsequent publication on the front page, except as already noted by the factors in the model. Accordingly, there was no autoregressive component evident in the model.