NATIONAL

White House disavows ‘smear’ of gay reporter
Drudge Report says Bush staff leak called attention to ABC journalist

LOU CHIBBARO JR.
Friday, July 25, 2003

The White House has disavowed a report that an anonymous White House staff member attempted to disparage an ABC News correspondent who broadcast a critical story about U.S. troop morale in Iraq by disclosing that the correspondent is openly gay and a Canadian citizen.

Presidential press secretary Scott McClellan said the White House had no knowledge of who — if anyone — allegedly leaked information last week to online gossip columnist Matt Drudge that veteran ABC News correspondent Jeffrey Kofman is gay.

Drudge told the Washington Post that a White House staff member alerted him to the fact that Kofman and his role as a prominent openly gay journalist was the subject of a December 2001 article in the gay magazine the Advocate. Drudge told the Post that the White House staffer also informed him that Kofman was a Canadian citizen, implying that his Canadian citizenship and his status as a gay man raised questions about his credibility.

When Drudge initially posted the Kofman story to his site, the headline pointed out the reporter’s sexual orientation and nationality. But within minutes, Drudge, who has refused to discuss allegations he is gay made by conservative gay writer David Brock, removed from the headline the reference to Kofman’s sexual orientation, though it remained in the body of the story.

The flap over whether someone at the White House tried to discredit a gay Canadian journalist for reporting an unpopular story was picked up by newspapers and radio talk shows, among other news outlets, throughout the country.

“While the facts behind this reported smear are unclear, the news coverage itself and the implications are very serious for all journalists and equally troubling for the American Public,” said Pamela Strother, executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Journalists Association.

“Whenever the coverage of a lesbian or gay journalist or the nationality of a reporter is criticized and discredited simply because of the individual’s birthright or sexual orientation, that is a form of dangerous intimidation and a potential professional libel,” Strother said.

The Post report on the development, filed by columnist Lloyd Grove on July 18, noted that the alleged leak came at a time when the White House and the Pentagon were upset over a July 15 story that Kofman filed from the Iraqi city of Falluja.

Kofman reported that the morale of U.S. troops assigned to the Third Infantry Division in Iraq appeared to be at an all-time low, with some of the troops openly criticizing President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for repeatedly postponing their scheduled return to the United States.

Kofman interviewed several troops who criticized U.S. officials on camera. One of them called for Rumsfeld’s resignation. Kofman’s story was broadcast on the “ABC News World Report,: a nightly newscast anchored by Peter Jennings, another Canadian.

McClellan told the New York Times that if Drudge’s report about a White House source releasing this information were true, it would be “totally inappropriate.” McClellan told the Times, “If anyone on my staff did it, they would no longer be working for me.”

Reporter accepts White House statement
ABC News officials have said Kofman has been doing an excellent job as the network’s main correspondent in Iraq.

“The White House said this type of thing, if true, would be totally inappropriate, and we agree with them,” said ABC News spokesperson Cathie Levine.

“Jeffrey is working virtually around the clock on the news in Iraq,” Levine said, including the developments this week surrounding the death of the two sons of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in a firefight with U.S. troops in the city of Mosul.

When asked if publicity about Kofman’s sexual orientation would create problems for ABC News or for Kofman, Levine said it would not.

“When we hire correspondents, the most important thing is their reporting skills,” she said. “He is a great reporter. That’s what matters.”

Kofman began his career as a television reporter in Toronto for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where he worked for 11 years before being hired by CBS News in the United States in 1997, according to the Toronto Globe & Mail. ABC News hired him in January 2001.

Kofman could not be reached in Baghdad by the Blade before press time.

In an interview with the Globe & Mail on July 19, Kofman said he accepts the White House disavowal of an official involvement in an apparent effort to discredit him for being gay or Canadian.

“I’m going to take the White House at face value and accept the comments that they made, which is that this is the first that they’ve heard of it and if it did happen then it was totally inappropriate,” he told the Canadian paper.

The NLGJA said Kofman is an active member of the group and is one of the founders of its Canadian chapter.

Mark Mead, a spokesperson for the national gay GOP group Log Cabin Republicans, said he, too, takes McClellan at his word.

“He said that anyone at the White House found doing this type of thing would be terminated,” Mead said. “It’s nice to know that this type of behavior won’t be tolerated at the White House.”

Dave Noble, executive director of the National Stonewall Democrats, which represents gay Democrats, said he found it troubling that someone in the White House reportedly tried to divert attention from problems surfacing over U.S. troops in Iraq to a gay news reporter.
“ If that’s true, it’s disgusting,” Noble said.

Old story with a new twist
Kofman isn’t the first national TV news reporter to have his sexual orientation become the story.

Pete Williams, the NBC News correspondent assigned to the Justice Department since 1993, made headlines when he took the position after a stint as spokesman for Vice President Dick Cheney, who was then the defense secretary for the first President Bush. Some gay activists criticized Williams for agreeing to represent the Pentagon, which at that time banned military service by gays.

Although Kofman appears to be the first gay journalist to be targeted by a White House political operative in recent years, an FBI document declassified in 1988 indicates that President Richard Nixon considered compiling a list of “homosexual” correspondents in the nation’s capital in 1970.

The document, a memo written by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, states that Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Halderman, telephoned Hoover on Nov. 25, 1970.

“He stated that the president wanted him to ask, and he would imagine I would have it pretty much at hand so there would be no specific investigation, for a run down on the homosexuals known and suspected in the Washington press corps,” Hoover wrote in his memorandum.

“I said I thought we have some of that material,” wrote Hoover, whose own sexual orientation has been the subject of controversy among his biographers. “Mr. Halderman mentioned [name or names deleted] and some of the others rumored generally to be,” the memorandum continued, “and also whether we had any other stuff: that he, the president, has an interest in what, if anything we know.”

California researcher Robert Ranftel, who, in 1988, was with the group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, said FBI officials told him that Hoover’s copy of whatever material may have been sent to the White House about gay journalists had been destroyed.

That same year, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy chief, told the Blade — and Halderman told the Washington Post — that neither of them had any recollection of receiving any such material from Hoover during the Nixon administration.

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