The Bakersfield Californian's Lame Excuse For Hiding Sen. Roy Ashburn's Hypocrisy

The Bakersfield Californian, the hometown paper of California State Sen. Roy Ashburn explained the reason they hid Ashburn's hypocrisy — that he is a gay man voting against gay rights – and secret: It wasn't relevant.

The Californian's executive editor Mike Jenner used a weekend editorial to explain why his newspaper didn't report on the gay rumors that were circulating the newsroom.

For years, we got the Christmas cards with the official family portrait — Roy Ashburn, his wife, kids and golden retriever, smiling for the camera. Political reporters tacked them up on their cubicle walls with the cards from other local politicians. When the Ashburns divorced, the cards stopped coming. Life went on, and so did Ashburn's political career as a legislator. But as the years rolled by, we heard rumors he was gay. We didn't report them for two important reasons. First, we didn't know it was true. Even if it was, we didn't see the relevance. I didn't believe it was news.

It took Ashburn's DUI arrest to change that, he says.

Things changed after news of his arrest came out Thursday. A highway patrolman arrested Ashburn in the early hours of Wednesday morning for allegedly driving drunk in a state-owned vehicle in Sacramento. His DUI was newsworthy. But there was more. A Sacramento television station, citing no named source, reported Thursday that Ashburn had been at a gay nightclub before his arrest. Even though an online news site later reported that the bar's manager said that wasn't the case, bloggers jumped on the story. Leading the charge were gay websites and bloggers who "out" closeted gay public officials, especially politicians who've taken positions seen as anti-gay.

And this is where Jenner admits he is wrong.

In reporting the DUI charge, Ashburn's sexuality was no more relevant than a heterosexual lawmaker's would be were he arrested for drunk driving. That he was leaving a gay bar — if we're to rely on Jenner's years-long thinking that Ashburn's sexuality wasn't worth touching — is immaterial, and thus the Californian shouldn't have even bothered reporting he is gay at all.

But they did. Or at least, they used the oldest trick in the book to do so: the paper "reported the blogosphere's feeding frenzy," says Jenner, which is always a cute way for the media to cover something in detail that's otherwise too controversial. Suddenly, Ashburn's sexuality is relevant because other people are talking about it. Rather than leading the coverage, the Californian found itself trailing behind; the area's CBS affiliate was the first to report the news.

But one thing print media always prides itself on? Investigating a story and getting the facts. If they are going to report on Ashburn, and there is knowledge that he might belong to a community that he's voting against, that is news. News that is worth reporting.
Jenner can play defense all he wants, but his newspaper — and others — failed in its duty to report a story that is relevant to voters. This isn't about outing. This is about transparency in government that affects the populous. And hypocrites in politics deserve to be outed. In the case of Ashburn, the outing just happened to include his sexuality.