Dana points out that, first of all, the Herald-Leader did not include a mugshot of Bradford, and furthermore, they omitted the original charges, which would have sent her to prison for at least 10 years, instead of the three-and-half she got in the plea deal. More importantly, however, they did not mention that the two students Bradford molested were female.

The Herald-Leader omitted this information despite the fact that the two victims were interviewed by local TV news

Years ago, I realized that the media deal with what we are now supposed to call “the LGBTQ community” not as reporters, but as public-relations agents. Their overriding concern is to ensure that the public receives only favorable information about gay people. Even when the news about gay people is very negative — and hey, the AIDS epidemic was kind of a bummer — the coverage is designed to encourage sympathy for gay people, who are portrayed as Just Like You and Me (Only Better).

So here you have a story about a lesbian teacher who molested two girls over a span of 10 years. In at least one case, the molestation began when the victim was just in middle school. This is rather heinous, and the LGBTQ Publicity Agents at the Lexington Herald-Leader therefore hit upon the clever idea of omitting the gender of the victims, so that readers would have no idea that the case involved homosexual behavior.

For the record, I have no idea whether gay people are more or less likely than heterosexuals to commit such crimes, and would be skeptical of any social science “research” on the question, whatever it showed. My point is that journalists ought not to be in the business of suppressing facts.