04.28.06
CBS News Lands On Logo
“We don’t want to be the 700 Club of gay news,” Jason Bellini says as he sips on a Diet Pepsi in the cafeteria of the CBS Broadcast Center. “The audience wants us to be credible. There are plenty of other outlets out there doing advocacy coverage.”
Bellini, 30, is the anchor of CBS News on Logo, the MTV-owned cable network targeting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender viewers that debuted last summer. CBS News produces four minutes of news each day for Logo: A three-and-a-half-minute newscast and a thirty second news brief. (It also produces periodic specials.) According to executive producer Court Passant, the CBS News-produced content runs more than 30 times each day on the network.
The coverage on CBS News on Logo centers on gay issues – recent story topics include a gay-themed children’s book, arrests in a St. Maarten gay bashing case involving CBS News employees, and the discharge of a lesbian Air Force nurse. But Passant says he and his staff of five “take great pains to make sure we don’t appear to be pandering to the audience.” He adds: “We are not a mouthpiece for the gay community.”
That doesn’t mean they play by the same rules as other media outlets, however. “We get our notions of balance and objectivity from voices within our community,” says Passant. On an issue like gay adoption, he says, that means they don’t have to put a conservative on air to balance the issue, since almost all of those opposed to gay adoption are outside the gay community.