Stepping All Over the Lede
BY ED SIKOV
There are a couple of reasons for a
news show to choose to lead a broadcast
with one story over another. It
could be that the anchor and their
producers think the story merits the prominence.
Or they may think that the audience
expects it.
Whatever their reason, Lester Holt and his
producers made a poor call last week when
reporting the story of Rump’s latest affront to
our democracy. Incredibly, their lead story was
about some idiot driving an SUV through a
mall somewhere; Forever 21 was spared, thank
God! Then there was a terribly important bus
crash, followed by a police chase in Louisiana,
and then Antonio Brown’s dismissal from the
Patriots. (Note: The Patriots are a football team
in Boston.)
After all this twaddle, NBC Nightly News fi -
nally got around to the most important news of
the month, if not the year: the president fl outed
the law, not to mention common sense (by
which I mean sense common to a gnat) by doing
something — which had only come to light
as this broadcast was preparing to air — that
caused a whistleblower to report the action to a
Trump-appointed superior, who deemed the action
alarming enough to alert Congress.
We now know that Rump was pressuring
the president of Ukraine to get dirt on Hunter
Biden, the son of the Democratic front runner
in the 2020 election, Joe Biden, and on Biden
himself.
My fi ngers have rarely been anywhere near
the pulsebeat of this increasingly inexplicable
nation. But Rump’s breach of statecraft (read:
the law) strikes me as infi nitely more important
than a stupid stunt drive through a mall in
which a few of those pointless and ugly mall kiosks
were damaged but no human beings suffered
so much as a scratch.
By pure coincidence, I’m sure, Ukraine has
been waiting for $390 million in military funding
from the US. Rump would never dangle the
promise of foreign aid to pressure a foreign government
to fi nd dirt about a political rival. No!
Never!
Also of no consequence is the fact that
Ukraine is holding its ground against Russia
(with the exception of the Crimea, which Russia
invaded and annexed in 2014), which of course
is run gangster-style by Rump’s sandbox pal,
Vladimir Putin.
AMAZON.COM
Sad to say, there was no clue 30 years ago just how evil the tricks
Renaud Camus had up his sleeve were.
The whole thing stinks. And by minimizing
its importance, NBC Nightly News abnegated its
responsibility to its viewers.
In an appalling story in Sunday’s New York
Times , we learned that the gay French writer
Renaud Camus has turned from entertaining
chronicler of his own sexual exploits to white
nationalist, French-style. Camus is the author
of the purportedly nonfi ction “Tricks,” which,
when it was published in the early 1980s,
earned the imprimatur of the preeminent cultural
theorist of the time, Roland Barthes, who
wrote its preface.
“Tricks” is provocatively raunchy. Camus
screws and sucks his way through Paris, and
readers are treated to it in microscopic detail.
Thanks to the gravitas afforded by Barthes’s
preface, I was able to put the book prominently
P E R S P E C T I V E : M e d i a C i r c u s
on my list of literature up for discussion in my
doctoral qualifi ers. I remember a particularly
entertaining section in which an American trick
cannot bring himself to pronounce the author’s
fi rst name correctly and resorts to calling him
“Wono,” much to Camus’ amusement.
Oh, how times have changed. Camus is no
longer a literary sexual outlaw. He’s become
a fascist. His most famous book is no longer
“Tricks” but rather “You Will Not Replace Us!”
(“Le Grand Remplacement,” en français), a call
to arms aimed at white French men and women
against the onslaught of darker races, people
Camus blames for supposedly destroying
French culture and society.
When colonialism comes home to roost, it
ain’t pretty.
I’m ashamed to have once championed Wono.
One imagines Roland Barthes is spinning in
his grave. (Barthes died an ignominious death
in 1980; he was run over by a laundry truck.)
“Just to be clear: LGBTQ media plays an
increasingly important role, especially at a
time like this. I had a grumpy moment where I
was thinking about some of the coverage that I
do get frustrated with that seems to tell people
how to be gay. And that’s, to be fair, happening
in a lot of different sources and places online and
in others, and it’s one reason why, as a candidate,
it’s healthy just not to read too many clips
about yourself to begin with. But I don’t want to
take away from the very good work that’s being
done in the queer media right now.”
That’s Pete Buttigieg attempting to explain
his nasty (to use a Rump word) coverage by the
LGBTQ media. Earlier, Buttigieg had said he
could not “even read the LGBT media anymore,
because it’s all, ‘he’s too gay,’ ‘not gay enough,’
‘wrong kind of gay.’”
I know what Buttigieg means, though I see it
more on Facebook and Twitter than I do in gay
media — in fact, I will will forgive him for not
noticing that the most talked-about pieces raising
questions about his gay cred did not appear
in LGBTQ media. It must be frustrating to be
under the particular microscope he not fi nds
himself, although surely he knew his every pore
would be overexamined when he announced
his candidacy.
I for one am waiting for the fi rst shirtless pics
to appear. Oh, okay. Truth be told, I wanna fuck
‘im.
Follow @EdSikov on Twitter and Facebook .
➤ IMPEACH & CONVICT,, from p.18
in the campaign fi nance violations that sent
his former personal attorney and fi xer, Michael
Cohen, to jail for three years. And he and his
administration have arrogantly dismissed any
concerns about the way in which properties
owned by Trump are being enriched by both
foreign actors and the president’s own traveling
team — in violation of two separate emoluments
prohibitions in the Constitution.
With these latest revelations — and the shrill
assertions by both the president and Giuliani
that nothing untoward took place here — Trump
is basically defying the law in plain view. Shooting
someone on Fifth Avenue, as it were.
The House can’t let him get away with this.
And neither can the Senate.
GayCityNews.com | September 26 - October 9, 2019 19
/AMAZON.COM
/GayCityNews.com