Gender of Editors Affects Coverage of Stories on Sex : Media: Women tend to favor more candor in reports on rape, AIDS and the private lives of politicians.

Early last year, the Des Moines Register published a gripping five-part series--the detailed account of one woman’s rape and its aftermath. Although the Register would subsequently win a Pulitzer Prize for “meritorious public service” for the series, Register Editor Geneva Overholser encountered resistance from several male editors on her staff before its publication.

The series “made more men editors on the staff uncomfortable,” Overholser says. When editors discussed the story, “the men around the table were much likelier (than the women) to say: ‘You mustn’t include this frank description; you’ll turn readers off right away, and they won’t read the rest of the story.’ ”

Specifically, Overholser recalls, some male editors wanted her to excise from the story such language as “after he had ejaculated” and “he . . . forced himself into her” and “the man unzipped his trousers, grasped his penis and ordered Ziegenmeyer to put it in her mouth.”

But these descriptions were “fairly clinical,” Overholser says. She refused to remove them, agreeing with her female editors and the female author of the story, all of whom “felt very strongly that we could not avert our eyes from the fact of the rape if the whole point of the story is to say what a rape victim goes through.” After all, for many years, newspapers would not even use the word rape; they preferred criminal assault.

Rape is, of course, more a crime of violence than a crime of sex--and it is a crime that “women are forced to think more . . . forthrightly about . . . than men are,” as Overholser says. But judging from more than 75 Times interviews in recent weeks, the differing attitudes of the male and female editors at the Register reflect a distinct division between the sexes generally in the handling of a wide range of stories with sexual implications--not just rape but everything from AIDS to contraception to political philanderers.

The number of women who are “directing editors” on newspapers in this country has more than doubled in the past decade, according to a study by the National Federation of Press Women. Robert Maynard, publisher of the Oakland Tribune, says that increase has translated itself into “much more frankness and candor than there used to be” in coverage of matters sexual.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Maynard says, “there used to be a much more smirky kind of tone to our coverage on matters of sex. We needed to give it a certain locker-room veneer. . . . I think the presence of women in the decision-making process has changed that.”

But women still hold only 16.6% of the directing editorships on U.S. newspapers. Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Fellowships at Harvard University and formerly an editor at the New York Times and Atlanta Constitution, says he thinks the still greatly flawed coverage of sex stories would be “much different if there were more women editors.”

“Women talking among themselves about sex are much more casual and calm about it than men,” Kovach says. “Men tend to treat it (sex) as a joke, (with) locker-room heroics or strutting, a cock of the walk sort of thing.”

Most women view the subject of sex through “an entirely different prism” than do men, Kovach says. “Because women bear children and see the relationship between sex and procreation much more clearly than most men do, their attitudes toward sex are more levelheaded, more grounded in the naturalness of the act than a man’s.”

Perhaps it is no wonder then that most male editors tend to be more squeamish and more ambivalent about coverage of sexually charged issues than do most women.

That statement is obviously a generalization--as is the oft-made statement that most women are generally more comfortable than most men in talking about virtually all aspects of personal relationships. There are significant exceptions to both generalizations. Moreover, one difference between men and women in journalism today may be that because the profession, like most others, has long beendominated by men, most women now in it are relative newcomers, generally younger than their male counterparts. Their attitudes may be generational as well as gender-driven.

Many female editors say they are not sure that women would necessarily do a better job covering most kinds of sex stories than do most men.

“I have not noticed . . . a difference in coverage defined by gender,” says Mary Hadar, assistant managing editor of the Washington Post. “Editors in general, men and women, are uncomfortable with many of these (sex-related) subjects because their readers make them uncomfortable. Editors are the ones who get the letters and the angry phone calls.”

Jennie Buckner, vice president for news at Knight-Ridder Newspapers, agrees with Hadar.

But women have long argued, quite rightly, that newspapers should hire and promote more women because their experience and insights would give readers a more comprehensive view of society.

As Buckner says: “There are things that a woman definitely can add, a female perspective that’s often lacking, on all kinds of stories,” including those involving sex.

In addition, Buckner and some other female journalists point out that newspapers have generally published most of their stories and frank language on sexual topics in their feature, lifestyle and health sections--sections often run by women.

“Stories dealing with such subjects as AIDS, health care . . . battered women, fertility, incest--real human issues--are seen by women as belonging on the front page, while male editors traditionally have thought of these subjects as belonging in the lifestyle section, if they think of them at all,” says Narda Zacchino, associate editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Some of these issues have more impact on women than on men.

Because the problems of reproduction and contraception are “felt far more profoundly by women than men,” medical reporter Janny Scott of the Los Angeles Times raised the question last year of whether stories on such issues are “given short shrift in papers” edited largely by men.

Contraception has long been seen (however unfairly) as primarily the responsibility of the woman in a relationship, and the word condom did not even appear in newspapers very often until condoms came to be widely seen as an effective deterrent to the spread of AIDS. Condom appeared 14 times in the New York Times and Washington Post combined in 1981; it appeared 547 times in 1987.

AIDS itself received grossly inadequate media coverage in its early stages. No AIDS story appeared on the front page of the New York Times until May 25, 1983--when 558 people had already died of AIDS in the United States. Legionnaire’s disease, which killed 29 people in 1976, received far more press coverage throughout the country in a few weeks than did AIDS in the first three years of its devastation, during which time several thousand people died from it.

According to a study by James Dearing and Everett Rogers of the Annenberg School of Communications at USC, “key media gatekeepers did not consider the epidemic newsworthy or appropriate.”

Why not?

AIDS was originally seen as affecting only a small, narrow segment of the population.

But the overwhelming majority of the “key media gatekeepers”--more than 90% of the newspaper editors in the United States in the early 1980s--were men, and this may also have contributed significantly to the way AIDS was covered . . . or not covered.

Some men--especially older men, raised in an earlier generation--are demonstrably hostile to homosexuals. Others feel threatened by the very existence of homosexuality. Many others are clearly discomfited by it.

“A lot of women have good friends who are gay men; they don’t have the psychological block that many men, maybe most men do,” says Harry Nelson, who covered the AIDS epidemic before retiring as medical writer for the Los Angeles Times in 1988. “Being friends with gay men is something most men don’t feel comfortable doing . . . That doesn’t seem to bother most women.”

Marlene Cimons, who has long covered AIDS for The Times, says “a degree of homophobia”--combined with a discomfiture about sex in general--affected the decisions of editors everywhere in early AIDS coverage. She says she does not think this was “a male/female thing,” but she says she does not know if female editors would have handled AIDS stories differently because “I don’t know of any women editors who were making decisions on AIDS stories at the time.”

Talk about AIDS “made many male editors and reporters uncomfortable,” just as it made the men she spoke to at the Centers for Disease Control uncomfortable, says Susan Okie, now on leave from her job as medical writer for the Washington Post. But, like Cimons, Okie says she did not have “parallel experiences” with female editors so she does not know if they would have done a better job on AIDS coverage.

Because so few women are in positions of real authority at newspapers--especially large, influential newspapers--it is difficult to say with any certainty whether newspapers would cover sex (or any other subject) better if there were more female editors. But both Nelson and Randy Shilts said, in virtually identical language, that female editors “definitely would have made a difference” on AIDS.

Shilts covered AIDS early on for the San Francisco Chronicle and wrote a book, “And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic,” that denounced governmental and media handling of AIDS. He said in a recent interview that, with few exceptions, “the stellar AIDS reporters in the early years . . . the people who did the best job--and the reporters who wanted to cover AIDS but their male editors wouldn’t let them--tended to be women.”

Thus, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the varying degrees of homophobia among many men has made them less sympathetic to gays in general and more likely to succumb to the syndromes of denial and indifference that marked the media’s early attitude toward AIDS and its victims.

Overholser, the Des Moines editor, says there may also have been another factor involved in the coverage of homosexuality in general and AIDS in particular.

“We deal with heterosexuality as the norm, the status quo,” she says, and women--as longtime outsiders and challengers of the status quo themselves--are generally “less inclined to feel strongly about defending the status quo than men are.”

The Times’ Zacchino offers a similar observation:

“Women reporters and editors I know thought of that story as it broke as a human tragedy; men, I think (politicians as well as journalists), thought of it as a homosexual story.”

Even when the press began to write more about AIDS, most newspapers were reluctant to identify it as a cause of death unless they had official confirmation--a course of action that critics say further stigmatized AIDS patients and initially made it possible for the government to underestimate the scope of the scourge and to delay AIDS research, funding and education. Many newspapers continue this practice today, only occasionally making exceptions for prominent individuals.

For the first several years of the AIDS epidemic, the press performed a further disservice by resorting to such ambiguous euphemisms as “intimate contact” and “exchange of bodily fluids” to describe AIDS transmission, much as they had, in earlier generations, used “social diseases” instead of “syphilis” and “gonorrhea.”

Such euphemisms about AIDS gave rise to widespread speculation and fear--all unfounded--that people could get AIDS from sweat or tears or kissing or sitting on a toilet seat. But most newspaper editors were reluctant to publish the phrase “anal intercourse” and other specific, graphic language.

“The refusal of the press to use the phrase ‘anal intercourse’ killed honest coverage of AIDS transmission,” Shilts says.

When Nelson tried to mention such risky sexual practices as rimming (anal/oral sex) and fisting (inserting the fist and sometimes part of the forearm in the anus), his editors at The Times excised the phrases. Nelson could not even get those phrases in the paper when he tried to use them without their definitions, deep in the body of a story, where readers not personally interested in the subject presumably would not see or be offended by them.

While experienced medical writers such as Nelson--and a few other reporters, male and female-- seemed able to use graphic language with a minimum of personal discomfort, their (generally male) editors were often squeamish about the language . . . and editors have the final say about what appears in the newspaper.

In subsequent years, most newspapers--including The Times--have used graphic sexual language in AIDS stories, and, as Shelby Coffey, now editor of The Times, says: “The body politic does not seem to have collapsed.”

Indeed, it can be argued that once newspapers finally began to write about AIDS explicitly, they became more willing to write about homosexuality--and sexuality in general--more explicitly.

“The AIDS story has propelled papers into covering sex subjects in a way they didn’t before,” says Soma Golden, national editor of the New York Times.

AIDS is not, of course, the only subject on which the press has historically been squeamish in its approach to frank language. Just as many newspapers published unskeptical stories on child molestation because editors and reporters assumed such heinous charges would not be made if they were not true, so a great number of these stories omitted salient details because editors feared that the language might offend readers.

Cimons says that when she wrote in 1989 about a controversial East Coast child-molestation case, editors refused to publish her account of charges that the child in the case had been photographed “inserting crayons and spoons in her vagina.”

Cimons says writing that description “made me squirm,” and she understands why her editors removed it, but she insists: “This was one of those stories where, if you’re going to do it--and I was specifically asked to do it--you have to hold your nose and be graphic.

“Therapists say that kind of aberrant behavior . . . abusing themselves, is typical of children who have been abused,” Cimons says. “This information was relevant to readers being able to make up their minds about what really happened. How can you make . . . any kind of judgment as a reader . . . if you’re deprived of crucial information?”

Cimons thinks female editors probably would have been more likely to agree with her than the male editors who made the final decision on her story, but she acknowledged that this is just speculation on her part.

There is no need for speculation, however, in discussing the impact women have had on the coverage of sex stories in the political arena.

Women now make up about 35% of the newsroom work force, and virtually every major news organization now has at least one woman, often more, on the campaign trail, which was virtually an all-male preserve in earlier generations.

Many journalists say this change has contributed significantly to the media’s increased coverage of a candidate’s sexual activities and preferences.

Not everyone agrees, of course. Some male reporters, in particular, disagree.

“Absolutely nothing in my 18 years in campaign politics adds a shred of evidence to that theory,” says John Balzar, a longtime political reporter now based in Seattle for the Los Angeles Times.

But David Broder of the Washington Post says the “dynamic” of covering candidates’ sex lives did “change very dramatically when women became almost as numerous . . . (as men) on the campaign trail.”

Broder and others, men and women alike, concede that the increased coverage of sex stories in politics these days is also attributable to reforms in the political process, to the rise of television and celebrity journalism and to increased competitive pressures and changing social mores. But many journalists--especially women--say it was the arrival of women in significant numbers that played the greatest role in the shift.

When the overwhelming majority of political reporters on the national campaign trail were men, they “covered up for their (political) pals, perhaps because some of them were doing the same thing,” says Eileen Shanahan, senior editor of Governing magazine. When women began covering presidential campaigns, they decided “we’re not part of this conspiracy,” and the rules changed, she says.

“The chronic womanizer who just can’t seem to stop probably has a very basic contempt . . . for most women in general,” Shanahan says. “I think women . . . reporters have a sense of that, and that is one of the reasons they don’t buy into this conspiracy of silence.”

Larry Sabato, author of “Feeding Frenzy,” a newly published book that examines “How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics,” noted in a recent interview that two female journalists who played major roles in stories this year about Sen. Charles S. Robb’s (D-Va.) alleged extramarital sexual relationship with a former beauty queen--charges Robb denied--”thought the most important part of the story was what it said about how Robb treated women.

“I’ve been studying that case for two years, and that question, that subject, hadn’t even occurred to me,” Sabato said.

But many women think “a man’s sex life tells you something about what kind of a person he is,” beyond his attitudes toward women, Shanahan and others say.

“Women do judge people by character,” says syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman. “It’s a gross generalization, but women tend to incorporate more different kinds of information when making a judgment about people.”

Many men (and some women) argue that a politician’s personal life is relevant and newsworthy only when it affects how he performs his political job, but the women’s movement slogan “The personal is political” is a more honest and complete approach, many women say. Eliminating one important element of an individual’s basic personality is “abnormal” in Goodman’s view.

Ann Lewis, a political consultant, says several male reporters have told her they are “uncomfortable” writing stories about politicians’ sex lives and “liked it better in the old days,” when such activities were ignored.

But as Lewis said two years ago, during a Harvard University conference on political scandals:

“In women’s experience, how people with power treat people without power is a measure of their character . . . whether they are fit for public office.”

In a recent interview, Lewis said women think that “how someone uses private power can be an accurate gauge . . . of whether or not they can be entrusted with public power. . . . The most common form of private power is the husband/father role, the family role.”

The exercise of that private power is “useful and worth considering, but is not in and of itself determinative,” she said. “It’s not the only thing we want to know.

“Given a choice between FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt), who had an affair . . . and Richard Nixon, who I’m prepared to believe did not . . . I have no doubt whom I’d prefer as President,” she said.

Some male journalists agree with Lewis on the importance of a candidate’s sexual relationships.

“At some point--and I would say that’s a point beyond a single fling or a massage--a person’s private behavior does reflect on who they are as a politician in a way that is legitimate for voters to know about,” says political commentator Michael Kinsley.

“Even if I concluded that Mr. X’s private life was irrelevant to me as a citizen and voter . . . it seems to me that if you have information that a significant number of people would find politically relevant--not just interesting but politically relevant, (that) would affect their decision on whom to vote for--I don’t think it’s your business to keep it from them,” Kinsley says.

Journalists often say they do not want to publish stories about a candidate’s sex life because they think that information is politically irrelevant, but what they really mean, Kinsley says, is that they are afraid others will think it is politically relevant.

Under such circumstances, a journalist who withholds information is either trying to protect a candidate he likes--as was, in part, the case with President John F. Kennedy--or he is arrogantly deciding for himself just what factors a voter is entitled to consider when deciding for whom to vote.

But Hendrik Hertzberg, editor of the New Republic--where Kinsley’s column appears--disagrees vigorously about the relevance of a candidate’s sex life.

“There is a sort of vulgar Freudianism in the assumption that a person’s private life, and particularly their sex life, is a philosopher’s stone that magically reveals their character in a way that other data about them does not,” Hertzberg argues.

The rationale for exposing a politician as a philanderer, Hertzberg says, is “the assumption . . . (that) if a person can’t keep their marriage vows, how do you expect them to keep their promises to the public.” But most politicians have “a voluminous public record . . . the degree to which they keep their promises in public life can be gathered from that public record,” he says.

If those promises have been kept, if the politician’s only significant flaw is in his private life, “then the philosopher’s stone turns to sand,” Hertzberg says.

But because so many female reporters seem to agree more with Kinsley than with Hertzberg, even those male reporters who might take Hertzberg’s side may implicitly be forced to write about the sexual activities of various candidates, if only to avoid being scooped. Some male reporters today share the women’s view, though, and are equally determined to expose the illicit sexual activities of the candidates they cover.

After all, it was male reporters who wrote the major stories that derailed Gary Hart’s presidential candidacy, and it was male editors who published those stories.

But author Sabato says there would be even “more emphasis on the character issue and the sexual aspects of it and probably more coverage of the hypocrisy, when it exists, between public and private life” if more women ran newspapers.

In fact, Tom Fiedler, political editor of the Miami Herald and author of the 1988 story on Gary Hart and Donna Rice that triggered the media feeding frenzy, says that when he wrote his Hart/Rice story, his thinking was influenced significantly by a column Ellen Goodman had recently written on how a politician’s womanizing reveals something about his character. Fiedler says that column helped persuade him that the story was worth covering because Hart’s “hypocrisy” was even more important than his alleged adultery.

Female reporters “reacted differently” to the Hart/Rice story than male reporters did, Fiedler says. Women “cut through” discussions about relevance and privacy and “went straight to the issues” of character and hypocrisy.

Kinsley says it is the very issue of hypocrisy that has made coverage of the sexual behavior of public officials so controversial.

“It’s hypocrisy that they’re protecting, not privacy,” Kinsley says. “They don’t say, ‘My private life is my own business; therefore, don’t cover my wife and children,’ he says. “They just say, ‘My private life is my own business; therefore, don’t cover my mistress.’ ”

Of course, the desire to expose hypocrisy--or simply to get a good story--is not unique to female journalists. Nor, for that matter, does the presence of women--as reporters or editors--automatically guarantee that an issue or a story will be handled more intelligently or more sensitively or more frankly than it would be by a man. After all, women played key roles in the New York Times profile of the woman allegedly raped by William Kennedy Smith, nephew of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), and that story was widely criticized as being insensitive and sensationalized.

There are obviously some differences between the sexes, but it would be rank sexism to suggest that reporters of either sex have a monopoly on intelligence, sensitivity, frankness or virtually any other quality.

Joyce Sherwood of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this series.