Corporate Media’s Queer Purge
It’s no coincidence that historic assaults on trans and queer people’s rights have been accompanied by the mainstream media’s widespread dismissal of LGBTQ+ journalists and the elimination of beats devoted to our lives.
Opinion, by Billie Jean Sweeney
The most dramatic rollback of human rights for trans people in a generation will be covered by a mainstream corporate press that has purged queer journalists from its ranks in a stunningly transparent series of politicized moves over the past month.
The Supreme’s Court’s decision last week to allow the Trump administration to unilaterally impose its hateful gender ideology on passports, before the issue had even been adjudicated in lower courts, will have cascading repercussions for trans people for years to come. At the same time, radical right-wing groups such as Liberty Counsel and the Alliance Defending Freedom have pledged to continue their efforts to overturn marriage equality and legalize the odious practice of conversion therapy.
This wave of bigotry comes as mainstream corporate media, already in the grips of a harsh rightward shift, has explicitly targeted queer journalists in new cutbacks and eliminated the rare platforms that covered queer people with sufficient knowledge, context and framing.
“Fewer and fewer national news outlets have teams dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights coverage, but anti-trans legislative activity is at its highest peak in 200 years,” said Kae Petrin, president of the nonprofit Trans Journalists Association, citing legislative research from Stanford. “Each contraction of resources for journalists covering these topics is a huge loss for public information and a huge loss for journalism, especially since these outlets have wide reach and longstanding public trust at a time that trust for national news is dwindling.”
Gone now is Teen Vogue, a trailblazing venue for young queer writers that regularly explored political policies from LGBTQ+ perspectives. Corporate parent Condé Nast also eliminated several staff jobs, most of them held by trans people or women of color — and then fired four more staffers, one of them trans, who sought to question an executive about its decisions.
Also eradicated in the recent purges was the award-winning NBC Out, one of earliest mainstream platforms to focus on trans issues. Rich Ferraro of GLAAD called NBC’s move “part of a dangerous pattern of mainstream media outlets choosing to lose trusted and talented journalists who focus on important LGBTQ news that otherwise is under-reported or not reported at all.”
Even before the firings, the mainstream corporate press had been failing so miserably in its obligation to fairly cover trans people that it typically doesn’t take the most fundamental journalistic step of all: Seek out and include our perspectives.
A new report from the Trans Journalists Association, which partnered with researchers at Berkeley Media Studies Group, analyzed coverage by major news outlets of the long stream of anti-trans decrees that Trump signed during his first 100 days in office.
“Within the sample’s articles,” its analysis found, “70 percent did not include a quote from a single trans person. Instead, journalists turned to cisgender sources — mostly government officials — to speak about trans people, their lives, and how they would be affected.”
Although young trans people were most frequently and viciously targeted by Trump, the report found that “transgender youth under 20 were quoted in just 6 percent of articles.”
Who did mainstream corporate media turn to? Trump, a member of his administration, or other Republicans were quoted in 50 percent of articles; Democrats were quoted in 32 percent of articles. Organizations that represent trans people were quoted in 24 percent of articles.
“It's important to speak to trans people not just as victims of policies that target us but as experts who can shape public understanding of the consequences and broader import of government actions, or even just as individuals with lived experience who see policies as they affect us. Those perspectives shouldn't just be sources or quotes, but can also serve as scaffolding as you decide how to frame your journalism,” TJA’s Petrin said in an interview with Assigned Media.
“If we do not quote the people who will live with the consequences of Trump’s rhetoric and actions,” the TJA report said, “journalism is failing to inform the public.”
This same basic failure was documented specifically in New York Times coverage in a 2024 report by Media Matters for America, which found the organization didn’t quote a single trans person in 66 percent of its stories on trans issues.
The New York Times, whose news coverage has spread anti-trans disinformation and sought to legitimize anti-trans bigotry, also discriminates in its staffing decisions. No trans news journalist is assigned to cover political issues involving trans people — a de facto prohibition that has existed for at least five years.
The increasing escalation of these types of anti-queer staffing decisions is set against a wider backdrop of new and astonishingly regressive discrimination against women and people of color at mainstream news organizations.
The Washington Post, whose owner has become a very public Trump patron, abruptly fired its only Black staff opinion writer, Karen Attiah, for social media posts that sought to put Charlie Kirk’s killing in the context of the nation’s broader political culture. Attiah, a veteran, award-winning staffer, was also the founding editor of the Post’s widely praised Global Opinions section.
At CBS, the new owner David Ellison made good on his pledge to Trump to eliminate diverse perspectives, disbanding the network’s race and culture unit that was set up after George Floyd’s killing. CBS, whose news operations are now led by the right-wing culture warrior Bari Weiss, also dismissed eight on-air correspondents, all of them women and half of them people of color.
Where can readers turn to detect bias in mainstream corporate coverage, and evaluate whether what they see is, in fact, true? “The Truth in Journalism Project and News Literacy Project both offer great resources for evaluating what you're seeing,” Petrin said. “Poynter has some self-directed courses to help build these skills.” Petrin also pointed to tools offered by the Digital Inquiry Group and CTRL-F.
But the future of a free press in the United States, one that’s not a compliant tool of government and is based on factual reporting, will ultimately rest with independent journalists themselves.
“My silver lining is that worker-run outlets and nonprofit newsrooms have sprung out of past mass layoffs,” Petrin said, “and many of those journalists have been able to continue their work. I hope we continue to see this kind of resilience, adaptation, and rethinking of journalistic models.”
Billie Jean Sweeney (she/her) is a freelance editor, reporter and advocate. She helped direct international news coverage for The New York Times and coverage of New York City for The Associated Press. She also served as editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she defended international press freedom. At The Hartford Courant she led an award-winning investigation into the deadly use of restraints in mental health institutions. For Assigned Media, she’s written about the right wing’s attacks on young trans athletes and how mainstream media adopted and spread anti-trans disinformation.