ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the difference between bias and the framing of issues in the newsroom culture. The Ellen DeGeneres story is a good example. This was a mildly tedious story of a likeable woman in a harmless sitcom, coming out of the closet slowly for six months to get some ratings and then having her ratings-week decision vastly overplayed because the media felt they had been stuck much too long in a no-news news cycle. Bias and the denial of rights are real, and straights have a lot to answer for in their historic cruelty toward gays. In fact, most Americans have a live-and-let-live attitude toward gays, but they don't frame the story the way the newsroom does. In the newsroom, of course, all this is viewed as nonsense and homophobia. The upshot is that because of newsroom framing, the real national conversation on homosexuality is not really being reported.
