Jesse Dirkhising

Jesse Dirkhising (May 24, 1986 - September 26, 1999), a 13-year-old American boy who was the victim of a 1999 rape and murder case, became the subject of a campaign in sections of the media and among political conservatives who argued that the murder had received minimal coverage in the mainstream media because the two killers were gay. They compared what they said was the "media suppression" of the Dirkhising case with the national attention given to the death of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man murdered in Wyoming in 1998.

On September 26, 1999, police in Rogers, Arkansas, responded to a 911 call and went to the home of David Carpenter, 38. There they found Joshua Brown, 22, described as Carpenter's lover. They also found Jesse Dirkhising, a 13-year-old boy from nearby Prairie Grove, tied to a mattress. Police investigation determined that Dirkising had been repeatedly anally raped over a period of hours, including with foreign objects. His ankles, knees and wrists had been bound in duct tape and he was gagged and blindfolded with his own underpants, held in place with a bandanna. He had been administered a sedative. He died in hospital shortly afterwards, his death attributed to asphyxia.

(In March 2001 Brown was found guilty of first-degree murder and rape. He was sentenced to life in prison, and this sentence was upheld on appeal by the Arkansas Supreme Court in September 2003. In April Carpenter pleaded guilty to similar charges and was also sentenced to life.)

On October 22, 1999, The Washington Times, a conservative newspaper, ran a story headed: "Media tune out torture death of Arkansas boy." The story contrasted the alleged lack of coverage of the Dirkhising case with the treatment the murder of Matthew Shepard received. The story quoted Tim Graham, the director of media studies at the Media Research Center, described as "a media watchdog organization," as saying, "Nobody wants to say anything negative about homosexuals. Nobody wants to be seen on the wrong side of that issue."

This theme was then picked up by other media outlets and conservative commentators. Bill O'Reilly wrote: "The question is stark and brutal. If the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay man, by two drunken thugs in Laramie, Wyoming, was a national story and a heinous hate crime, why wasn't the killing of 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising publicized the same way? Jesse was tortured, sodomized and finally killed by a gay man as another homosexual watched in the small town of Rogers, Arkansas.

"Yet the national media ignored the crime, causing outrage among those who see hate crimes as a tool being used to hammer the agendas of special interests. The two men who murdered Shepard have been convicted and, most likely, will spend the rest of their lives in prison. But the two men allegedly involved in the killing of Jesse Dirkhising have yet to be tried, and when they are, you may not even hear about it."

A well-known gay commentator, Andrew Sullivan, commented on what he saw as media bias in coverage of the Shepard and Dirkhising cases. He wrote in The New Republic: "In the month after Shepard's murder, Nexis recorded 3,007 stories about his death. In the month after Dirkhising's murder, Nexis recorded 46 stories about his... I think there's clearly evidence that many people in the media decided, 'Well, we're not going to go there because we know it will feed anti-gay prejudice'."

Other commentators were quick to respond to allegations of media bias. On November 14, 1999, E. R. Shipp, ombudsman at The Washington Post, generally regarded as a liberal newspaper and principal competitor of the Washington Times, noted that: "readers, prodded by commentators who are hostile to homosexuals and to what they view as a ‘liberal’ press" had raised questions about the Dirkhising case. He noted that the Post had run a story from the Associated Press on the Dirkhising murder. Shipp, said however, that he "made a clear distinction" between the Dirkhising and Shepard cases: "Matthew Shepard’s death sparked public expressions of outrage that themselves became news," he wrote. "That Jesse Dirkhising’s death has not done so is hardly the fault of the Washington Post."

On 4 November 1999, Jonathan Gregg addressed the issue in TIME magazine. He asked: "Could it be because we in the media elite were unwilling to publicize crimes committed by homosexuals because it didn't suit our agenda? The next stop in that line of reasoning was clear: That news is controlled by a bunch of gay-loving liberals only too happy to wield a double standard."

Gregg discussed what he saw as the differences between the Shepard and Dirkhising cases: "The most salient difference between the Shepard case and this one is that while Shepard's murderers were driven to kill by hate, the boy's rape and death was a sex crime. It was repulsive, unconscionable — and the predictable pastime of perverted criminals... Matthew Shepard died not because of an all-too-common sex crime, but because of prejudice. Essentially, Shepard was lynched — taken from a bar, beaten and left to die because he was the vilified "other," whom society has often cast as an acceptable target of abuse; Dirkhising was just "another" to a pair of deviants. And while child abuse is unfortunately no big news, lynching still is."

The reason the Dirkhising case had not received national media attention, Gregg wrote, was "because it offered no lessons. Shepard's murder touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons. Jesse Dirkhising's death gives us nothing except the depravity of two sick men. There is no lesson here, no moral of tolerance, no hope to be gleaned in the punishment of the perpetrators."

The issue continued to run over the next three years. A Google search in October 2003 produced 2,500 "hits" on the name Dirkhising. Of the first 50 references, 45 came from sources discussing the reporting of the Dirkhising case in relation to alleged pro-homosexual or "liberal" bias in the media, or using the case as an argument against gay rights.