While reading “The Minority Press: Pleading Our Own Case,” it became obvious why there was a need for the minority press in the past. Pamela Newkirk outlined a strong argument for media that covers minority interest denoting the restrictions on free speech for minorities before the civil rights movement. While Newkirk pointed out that minorities are underrepresented and stereotyped in the media, she fell short of making a clear argument for why minority presses are needed in a post-civil rights movement era. I had a hard time believing that our troubles now are anywhere near the trials that were around for minorities in the previous two centuries. Contrarily, Mitchell Stephens and David T.Z. Mindich make a much stronger argument for minority press in “The Press and Politics of Representation.” In a simple short sentence, the two authors make clear that the limitations of journalism require (if not an ethnic press) a media more in tune with minority affairs. They argue that “journalism, the point is, is mindset bound and mindsets are boundless” (376). Here they state that the misrepresentativeness of media oversimplifies the complexities of important issues to stereotypes and limited coverage. To better understand the debate regarding the importance of the minority press, I had to investigate it myself.

Because the issues facing society are not as grave as they were during slavery, nor are they as severe as they were before civil rights legislation, it was difficult to see a clear need for minority media. To this end, I decided to explore the minority press of the most egregiously excluded and over stereotyped minority group I could find in contemporary society: the gay and lesbian community. Much like Fredrick Douglass’s North Star and the Freedom Journal, the Washington Blade attempts to gain rights and freedoms for an under represented community. The Blade covers topics on both the local and the national level that would be of interest to the Washington D.C. gay and lesbian community. In the local section, articles cover adoption “beats,” hate crime reports, and local health and business issues. The national section covers more political issues such as marriage rights debates across the country and how the issues facing politicians in DC affect the gay and lesbian community.

Although the Blade covers topics that are important to a minority group that is often ignored in the mainstream media, it comes up far short from serving  as an influential advocate to plead the case of gays and lesbians in the same way that the black press fought for freedom in the nineteenth century. The paper covers issues that affect gays and lesbians, but does not appear to have the same thrust as historical accounts of the minority press. This leads me to the question: if the minority press isn’t covering topics as important as slavery, what value does it serve in the modern media landscape? Given the statistics listed by Newkirk about the underrepresentation of minority reporters and minority stories in the media, it would be hard to argue that the minority press is not needed or that it does not provide valuable information. I believe that the minority press is less of an advocacy group to plead the case of each group to the world, but rather that it is evolved to be a means of interpreting stories in the context of a niche group. As much as we’ve talked about the press as a filtering authoritative institution, it is as limited as the journalists that make it up. In this sense, the value of the minority press stems from insight it offers to minority groups regarding issues of both local and national concern.