Controversy and the Newspaper's Public: The Case of Tongues Untied

Abstract

Newspaper coverage of a controversy over public television stations' carriage of the African American gay video poem Tongues Untied provides the material for analysis of how print journalists — ostensibly serving the public's need to know about issues of public importance — address issues in which “the public” is itself a contested notion. Reviews, columns, and articles from newspapers nationwide are analyzed. Typically the journalism acknowledged individual speech rights and abided by professional reporting conventions, but did not acknowledge that the very definition of the public and of public television's obligations was in contest.