to a pair of deviants. And while child abuse is unfortunately no big news, lynching still is." In the month after Shepard's murder, LexisNexis recorded 3,007 stories about his death compared with only 46 in the month after the Dirkhising murder. However, once the media seized on the story, this count rapidly rose into the thousands. Many of the articles justified the lack of coverage, citing that the death did not justify national attention; initial reports failed to mention that the two perpetrators were gay, whereas the Shepard reports identified Shepard as gay and the crimes as hate crimes from the beginning. In a November 4, 1999, Time magazine article, Jonathan Gregg opined that accusations of liberal media bias were not justified because the two cases varied with the Dirkhising murder offering "no lessons," whereas the Shepard murder "touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons." Accusations of homophobia Commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote an article in The New Republic accusing the liberal media of political correctness and using Dirkhising's death to attack the Human Rights Campaign for its support of hate-crime legislation. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), however, complained that The Washington Times "omitted a key piece of information" for its front-page story on Dirkhising: The HRC had provided a statement strongly condemning the crime and called for the perpetrators to be punished "to the fullest extent of the law." Sullivan also criticized some aspects of the conservative coverage of the Dirkhising case equating gay sex with child molestation as "ugly nonsense". Sullivan squarely summed up the differences in media coverage as being due to political interests. Sullivan stated that whereas the Shepherd case was used to support including LGBT people in federal hate-crime law the Dirkhising case was ignored for concerns of inciting anti-gay prejudice. In November 1999, E. R. Shipp, ombudsman at The Washington Post, noted that "readers, prodded by commentators who are hostile to LGBT people and to what they view as a 'liberal' press" had raised questions about the Dirkhising case. Shipp said, however, that she "made a clear distinction" between the Dirkhising and Shepard cases: "Matthew Shepard's death sparked public expressions of outrage that themselves became news. . . . That Jesse Dirkhising's death has not done so is hardly the fault of