Losing Matt ShepardJoin now to read essay Losing Matt ShepardA CauseBeth Loffreda, an associate professor of English and the advisor of the Gay and Lesbian rights group at the University of Wyoming, stresses for change in her publication “Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder” (2000).
Her publication is a study of how the residents of Wyoming responded when Shepard, a young gay student at the university in Laramie, was brutally beaten, tied up to a fence, and left to die by the side of the road. Loffreda examines and documents the multifaceted problem caused by the media frenzy, fanatic religious groups, and the prejudices of Wyoming and the rest of the country.
Loffreda believes that the hysteria in Wyoming was ignited by a media that developed its own sensationalist spin. Matt’s death is only one of many deaths that year; however, his death received an enormous amount of the media’s attention. The news frenzy became so carried away, that Shepard’s family received “about 10,000 letters and 70,000 emails” in response to the image broadcasted by the media (327). However, most of the media reports were hype and exaggeration, with little if any truth! Many things were exaggerated to increase the ratings of the news stations, and the Journalists misinterpreted many key facts, such as how Matt was tied to the fence, and that he “got burned.” The news also reported how Wyoming is a “hate state,” a statement that Wyoming residents strongly disagreed with.
Beth Loffreda illustrates how the death of Matt Shepard influenced many individuals and groups, including religious leaders. A reporter mistakenly related the incident involving Matt Shepard to a crucifixion, seeing as how Shepard was pinned to the fence, “spread-eagled, splayed out” (312). This instigated a false perception that Matt Shepard had been “tied like a scarecrow.” The news that Shepard had been tied up “something akin to a crucifixion” became the starting point for the reaction to follow (313). Many religious leaders and organizations used his death as an example to help their own causes (319). The mistaken belief that Shepard had been strung up on the fence “in a haunting image of the crucifixion” provided a rich, obvious source of symbolism. Religious leaders, journalists, and other individuals often would draw the comparison (327). This perception assisted in grabbing the emotional entrails of all who listened, and fanned itself until it burst into a gigantic firestorm of unsubstantiated exaggeration.
Yet, all the stories eventually turned out to be false rumors. Shepard was never “tied like a scarecrow”. He was found lying “on his back, head propped against a fence, legs outstretched” (312). Even more amazingly inaccurate, both of Shepard’s hands were “lashed behind him and tied barely four inches off the ground to a fencepost,” in no relation to the figure taken by a crucifixion, the symbol that moved many religious leaders to impose their anti-gay beliefs and other arguments (312).
Another media fabrication was that instance of inaccuracy with the media was when journalists had a discussion on whether Shepard had been burned by his tormentors. Theseir reports lacked any factual logical basis, since Shepard never was burned. One reporter exclaimed started saying, “hey, I understand he got burned,” and another reporter then asked, “Where did he get burned?” Someone else then shouted out, “Oh, on his face,” and all the other reporters quickly took note of the incident. The reporters all acted “as sources for each other.” They would never say where, or from whom, [the information] had come from” (317). The media had become a closed loop, feeding off their own energies (318).
The Media of the 1950s and 1960s
The American press was made to feel that the mass media were more powerful institutions that had always held them accountable. Their own “accountability” was undermined by the mass media that would regularly hold them back on national life, including the media in the mid- to late 1970s and into the early 1980s. The media also helped to perpetuate the myth about the superiority of the “mainstream media.”
The media in the late 1970s did great work, but its influence on policy-making, media quality, and culture—including the public itself—was not all that it should have been. The result was a long series of problems that had a serious impact on a majority of press members. This article explains what happened in the period and offers some of the key points of action that were necessary in the wake of this crisis.
The first major crisis that affected the media in the late 1970s and early 1980s was the so-called press reform. A majority of members of the media had been convinced that it was a corrupt establishment, with a vested interest in preventing press coverage from falling into a corruption of the whole system. The press, for example, used mass media to spread its message by portraying a “reform,” rather than an investigation by the press. This policy and practice was repeated in print and in television, radio, films, and TV commercials, with little controversy. The reform program spread quickly and widely but, crucially, failed. The media’s efforts were thwarted by some of the major reform organizations that supported it rather than by other reforms. However, the reform policy and policies still served an important function of making the press more mainstream.
The media made significant improvements on the basic political policies to which it was supposed to report news. For example, the Washington Free Beacon was a major reform group that embraced an alternative, more open “establishment” agenda, much in the same way that the New York Times, Time, and other political parties embraced an all-out partisan war against Democrat (1946, 1946, 1947). In all these cases, the media’s coverage of the new order had become a complete failure; there was no one-man press corps to report on issues in a “real” democracy. As a result of the media’s failure—with its media control of the press and media coverage of the New York Times—to deal with major problems in the United States, the public was increasingly unwilling and perhaps even powerless to report on major issues—issues that many public institutions have traditionally ignored. By the end of the 1970s, the press had been severely weakened, and the New York