NPR censors their review of new gay documentary -- is it an "Outrage"?

National Public Radio has created a controversy by censoring their review of the new documentary Outrage, which ironically alleges that the news media censor information about closeted gay politicians in ways that they might not about other issues, indieWire.com is reporting.

The review, which had been approved by an NPR editor, had cited several of the men mentioned in the film as being gay, including former Idaho Senator Larry Craig and Florida governor Charlie Crist, but those names were cut from the piece.

Nathan Lee, the out gay writer of the review, subsequently requested that his name be taken off the article. When he explained his position in a comment on the network's website, it too was deleted.

NPR's journalistic policy on privacy, posted on their website, reads, “Only an overriding public need to know can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy."

“The entire point of Outrage is that there is an ‘overriding public need to know’ about the kinds of men profiled in Outrage,” Lee told indieWIRE.com of the controversy. “Let’s say Charlie Crist had a record of voting for vigorous anti-immigration policies, and then it was rumored that he employed illegal immigrants. The press would have absolutely no qualms investigating him to the hilt in the public interest of exposing hypocrisy. Why should it be any different in the case of possibly gay public figures who vote against the civil rights of gay people, or, in the case of HIV/AIDS funding, their very life and death?”

“NPR has a long-held policy of trying to respect the privacy of public figures and of not airing or publishing rumors, allegations and reports about their private lives unless there is a compelling reason to do so,” said Dick Meyer, NPR’s executive director of Digital. “This may be considered old-fashioned by some, but it is a policy we value and respect.”

According to Eamonn Bowles, head of Magnolia Pictures, which is distributing Outrage, NPR is not the first national news organization to decline to report the allegations in the film. At least two other national networks have done the same.

“It’s not about outing,” Bowles said. “It’s about hypocrisy, people are saying one thing and doing another.”

Read the entire article here.