He conceived the show after becoming aware of the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights and took as his focus the 1979 San Francisco mayoral election.
The National News Council, a media watchdog organization, found that CBS had violated journalistic standards through misrepresentation purposely to reinforce stereotypes and through deceptive editing.
[2] For this new program, he intended to focus on the 1979 San Francisco mayoral election[3] and the political strength of the gay voting bloc in the city, which the several candidates were courting.
He seemed to want me to vilify Diane (sic) Feinstein in some way and set her in opposition to the gay community....During one of the breaks I told him that I didn't feel good about it...I felt I had been twisted and manipulated.
[9]Crile's report, rather than exploring the thesis laid out by Reasoner, instead focused in large measure on sexual activity, including men cruising in Buena Vista Park and interviews with so-called sadomasochism consultants.
"[10] He compared San Francisco to the Weimar Republic, asking Cleve Jones, "Isn't it a sign of decadence when you have so many gays emerging, breaking apart all the values of a society?
A gay journalist named Randy Alfred, who had covered many of the same campaign events that were included in the episode, spent some 300 hours researching what he believed to be factual errors and misrepresentations within the broadcast.
[13] By July 10 he had prepared a 20-page complaint outlining 44 alleged instances of misrepresentation which he filed with the National News Council, a media watchdog organization.
Network vice-president Robert Chandler dismissed the bulk of Alfred's complaints as "trivial, irrelevant or clearly represent[ing] matters of opinion or judgment".
After dismissing many of them as without merit, The NNC found by a vote of 9–2 that CBS had unfairly misrepresented a number of sexual issues, including in the BDSM scenes.
"[18] CBS was also found to have offered distorted coverage of the city's annual Beaux Arts Ball and to have manipulated the soundtrack by adding the applause.
"[11] Jeff Jarvis of The San Francisco Examiner wrote, "It's shocking that CBS News, home of Walter Cronkite, would partake of such bigotry.
[19][25] Reporter Crile interviewed San Francisco coroner Dr. Boyd Stephens, who stated that 10% of homicides in the city were gay-related and that some of those were related to the BDSM community.
His words, which Stephens would later acknowledge were based on hearsay,[23] were widely and inaccurately reported as meaning that 10% of all homicides in San Francisco were related to BDSM.
[28] The Moral Majority, in its successful campaign to repeal a San Jose, California gay rights ordinance, used an image from the program along with the slogan "Don't Let It Spread!"
[33] She further castigated the show for excluding lesbians and people of color (although she acknowledges that this to an extent mirrored the state of gay leadership at the time) and noted her belief that anti-gay attack videos produced in the 1990s were modeled on this broadcast.
[35] Browning wrote: As a credentialed, respectable, middle-class professional—an ordinary person who reports, writes and speaks through the airwaves about conventional social issues of family, economy, health, and politics and who pursues the limits of lust in parks and sex clubs—I continue to wonder whether CBS was really incorrect in its characterization of gay men.
[35]While echoing criticism about the exclusion of lesbian concerns and the distortions contained in the broadcast, Browning went on to note that sexual freedom has always been part of the gay male agenda and that it would be absurd to pretend otherwise.