[2] He covered major events of the 1960s and 1970s such as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, urban riots, and government scandals.

Because of his role at the paper during the Watergate reporting, Aarons was hired as an accuracy consultant for the Post-centered film about the scandal, All the President's Men.

Maynard had been working with a summer program for minority journalists at Columbia University, and he urged Aarons to join its faculty.

[citation needed] At the Tribune, Aarons rose to executive editor and then to senior vice president for news, where he worked for greater staff diversity.

[6] After working for over a year, in Fall 2003, Aarons, Dane S. Claussen, Amy Falkner, Rhonda Gibson, and others relaunched the then-GLBT Interest Group of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication (AEJMC).

Aarons, then teaching at the University of Southern California, followed that up by persuading the Accrediting Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (ACEJMC) to add sexual orientation content in its curriculum diversity standard.

On its 15th anniversary in 2006, NLGJA established the annual Leroy F. Aarons Scholarship Award for a lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender student pursuing a journalism career.

In 1999, as a visiting professor of journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, he founded and directed its Sexual Orientation Issues in the News program.

Adapted by universities,[citation needed] the program analyzes how the media has shaped public perception of people and issues since the early 20th century.

The group biannually presents the Leroy F. Aarons Award for career contributions to media-oriented education and research affecting LGBTQ.

Archived September 19, 2017, at the Wayback Machine Composed by Glenn Paxton, Monticello portrays the love affair between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

After the attacks of Sep 11, 2001, Aarons wrote the libretto for Sara's Diary, 9/11, an opera composed by his collaborator on Monticello, Glenn Paxton.

A song cycle, this work is a fictional account of a pregnant woman, who, after her husband dies in the tragedy, experiences deeply mixed emotions.