GLAAD To Fox News: If You Want To Attend Our Events, Stop Attacking LGBT People

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Written by Carlos Maza

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Representatives from Fox News attended this year's annual Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) media awards, prompting the organization to condemn the network's history of anti-LGBT coverage.

GLAAD hosted its annual media awards - meant to honor the media for outstanding representations of the LGBT community -- in New York City on March 16. According to pictures from the event, at least two Fox News personalities were in attendance -- The Five's Kimberly Guilfoyle and America's News HQ's Jamie Colby:

In response, GLAAD Vice President of Communications Rich Ferraro issued the following statement to Equality Matters:

If Kimberly and Jamie expect to attend future GLAAD events, they will first need to sit down with us to discuss Fox News' embarrassing, biased and misinformed coverage of LGBT issues. The invitation is open. Fox News's track record on LGBT issues is abysmal, and it makes no sense to me why any LGBT people or allies would want to be a part of that.

UPDATE: On March 22, GLAAD vice president of communications Rich Ferraro issued the following clarification of his earlier statement:

"My earlier statement was a reaction to Fox News' coverage of LGBT people and not any individual journalists. A GLAAD executive did invite Kimberly and Jamie to the GLAAD Media Awards, and we were happy to have them, with the belief that they signaled a change in the way Fox News would cover LGBT issues.

But the next day, we had a flurry of reports that Fox News let anti-gay activist Tony Perkins make the false and dangerous claim on national television that 'evidence' shows that being gay is 'overwhelmingly negative to both the individual and society.'

It was not my intention to offend Kimberly or Jamie. Part of our work at GLAAD is to raise awareness and visibility of allies from all walks of life, particularly among the growing number of conservatives who support LGBT people, and we look forward to working with voices like Kimberly, Jamie, and any other allies at Fox News to accomplish that."

Ferraro has a point. Fox News has a long, shameful history of defaming LGBT people while misinforming viewers about the fight for LGBT equality. Here's just a short list of the network's most recent anti-LGBT smears:

  • Fox News host Bill O'Reilly accused a gay Colorado lawmaker of protecting child molesters
  • O'Reilly called a Massachusetts school policy protecting transgender children "truly madness"
  • Fox repeatedly adopted the “pedophilia” narrative while covering the Boy Scouts' gay ban
  • Fox Nation used an image of from the film "Mrs. Doubtfire" to mock transgender healthcare
  • O'Reilly and Fox News host Megyn Kelly joked that a transgender prison inmate was too unattractive to risk being sexually assaulted
  • Fox fearmongered that gender-neutral marriage licenses in Washington would “change society... forever”

And on March 20, a Fox News columnist smeared a transgender MMA fighter, repeatedly calling her a man and accusing her of “beating up women.”