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http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=131125&page=1#.UEPFxMFlSIw

A 13-year-old boy in Arkansas dies after a horrific sexual crime 
but much of the national media ignore the story. Conservative 
columnists and other critics think they know why � because the 
boy's accused killers are gay.

"[The media] doesn't want the public to think about 
homosexuality and pedophilia and torture and the murder of 
children," says Don Feder, a conservative columnist at the 
Boston Herald.

The boy, Jesse Dirkhising, was bound, drugged, tortured and 
raped for five hours before he died in 1999.

Last month, a jury convicted Joshua Brown, 23, of rape and 
murder. Brown was sentenced to life in prison without parole, 
the maximum sentence. Brown's lover, Davis Carpenter, 39, goes 
on trial next month.

But the case received little attention in the national media. 
Critics say that is evidence of pro-gay bias, noting that news 
organizations gave extensive coverage to the 1998 murder of 
Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who was hung on a fence post by 
two straight men and left to die.

Expected Opponents and One Unexpected Critic

Protesters outside Brown's trial in Bentonville, Ark. held signs 
that read, "Pro-Gay Media Shame." Conservative and anti-gay 
groups have made the same argument for months on their Web sites 
and in their publications.

Their argument was given more weight when it was embraced by one 
of the country's most provocative gay writers, Andrew Sullivan, 
in The New Republic.

Sullivan compared media coverage of the two cases, and found 
what he described as a "staggering" discrepancy. He concluded 
that the media "hyped" the Shepard case to build support for the 
inclusion of gays under federal hate crime protection, and 
ignored the Dirkhising case for fear of feeding anti-gay 
prejudice.

"I think there is clearly evidence that many in the media 
decided we're not going to go there because we know it will feed 
anti-gay prejudice," Sullivan told ABCNEWS.

Shepard Symbolic of a National Issue

Editors at the television networks and major newspapers have 
responded that they covered the Shepard crime because it was 
part of a national issue � hate crime legislation.

"For a crime story or a murder story, even a horrific and sad 
one like [that of] Jesse Dirkhising, to be covered by the 
national press, I think there has to be an issue of larger 
social significance attached to it," says Martha Moore, a media 
reporter for USA Today.

Editors say that while it may seem cold, countless rapes and 
murders � gay and straight � regularly go unreported in the 
national media because they are not part of a larger issue.

Horrific Crime

Editors also say that the horrific details of the Dirkhising 
case made it hard to report.

According to an account Brown gave police after his arrest, he 
and Carpenter had tied Dirkhising to a bed with duct tape as 
part of a "game." Then they gave Dirkhising an enema of urine 
that they had dosed with amitriptyline, an antidepressant and a 
sedative.

Jesse was gagged with a pair of dirty underwear while Brown 
raped the boy and Carpenter directed the scene, according to 
Brown's account. The boy died of suffocation, which Brown said 
was an accident.

Brown told police he was acting on instructions that Carpenter 
wrote and drew for him on a pad of paper. Prosecutors plan to 
use the notes and diagrams as evidence at Carpenter's trial.

Another charge prosecutors intend to make at Carpenter's trial 
is that the men were planning on other rapes. Prosecutors intend 
to to submit handwritten short stories that police found in 
Carpenter's apartment, which were explicit writings envisioning 
future rapes and tortures, mentioning one local girl by name.

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