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Without Fear, Favor Or . . . Offensiveness
By Dan Seligman
The Wall Street Journal | November 19, 2001
NOTES FROM
THE DIVERSITY FRONT,
media division:
The New York Times runs a long, admiring article identifying
Patrick Chavis, a black doctor in Los Angeles, as evidence that
affirmative action in medical schools is working
the way it was meant to, by bringing good doctors into minority
neighborhoods.
Later, after many botched operations and a patient's death,
Chavis loses his
license. The Times never reports it.
Matthew Shepard, a homosexual
in Wyoming, is brutally attacked by two thugs and left to die, tied to a fence
in sub-freezing temperature. The story is, quite properly, a nationwide media
sensation. Not long after, a 13-year-old Arkansas boy named Jesse Dirkhising
is sadistically raped for hours, then left to die, by two next-door homosexuals.
The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC
ignore the story entirely.
Paul Teetor, an award-winning
reporter at Vermont's Gannett-owned Burlington Free Press, is covering a local
forum on racism. A young white woman tries to speak and is told by the moderator,
a mayoral aide, that only "people of color" are allowed to speak. Mr. Teetor
agrees with the woman that this is "reverse racism" and says so in his next-day
news story. The mayoral aide says he will organize a march on the Free Press
if Mr. Teetor isn't instantly fired. He is indeed fired, in a 90-second meeting
at which he has no chance to defend himself. In the ensuing wrongful discharge
suit, it emerges that the editor who fired him is under pressure from Gannett
to improve his "mainstreaming" scores. That term refers to a program where
editors are supposed to meet a variety of racial targets in hiring, in the
use of sources and in positive news coverage. (After a few days of testimony,
Gannett caves in and settles the suit.)
In a major New York
Times series on immigration, readers are told that assimilation – the traditional
melting-pot model – is "seen as a dated, even racist concept."
The Times has denounced proposals for reducing immigration totals as
"rude inhospitality" and "racist or at least xenophobic."
As these examples suggest,
William McGowan is especially tough on The New York Times (a point he concedes)
in Coloring
the News (Encounter, 278 pages, $25.95), his scathing report on
media political correctness and its accompanying distortions of reality. But
his abundant examples, drawn from many different directions, will persuade most
readers – possibly even some dug-in correctniks – that something has gone seriously
wrong in our country's newsrooms, now massively committed to the ideology of
"diversity."
Mr. McGowan, a journalist
who has written for several national publications, including The Wall Street
Journal, tells us that the commitment was supposed to improve the quality
of journalism while boosting the publishers' profits. Reporting would be better
because a more diverse newsroom would come up with a broader range of stories
and perspectives. And the bottom line would benefit as people of color saw that
the publication was not just for "whites only."
This double-barreled theme
was the dominating idea of a 1992 revival meeting (to caricature only slightly
the spirit of the occasion) sponsored jointly by the American Society of Newspaper
Editors and the Newspaper Association of America. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the
publisher of The New York Times, was a major speaker at the meeting and
in its aftermath repeatedly proclaimed that "diversity is the single most important
issue" facing The Times. He pledged to hire an openly gay editor and
in other ways pushed minority preferences to the limit, observing at one point:
"We can no longer offer our readers a predominantly white, straight male version
of events and say that we, as journalists, are doing our job."
None of the media authority
figures promoting this crusade seem prepared to admit that the new version of
events has been a ghastly failure, but it has certainly not done what it was
supposed to do. It has filled newsrooms with partisans for minority causes,
many of them activists in the black, Latino, Asian-American, women's, and gay/lesbian
journalists' associations, whose pressures lead editors to self-censorship and
distortion when those causes seem threatened by stories – like, say, the Patrick
Chavis disaster – at variance with politically correct news perspectives.
So the first casualty of
"diversity" is the broader coverage it was intended to bring. Circulation appears to
be another casualty. The expected legions of minority news consumers never
showed up, and newspaper circulation figures have trended downward in the age
of diversity. Another of its unintended consequences has been the rise of talk
radio. "While it may not always have its facts nailed down," Mr. McGowan observes,
"this populist, largely conservative medium does get out the news that mainstream
journalists have long ignored or suppressed."
An interesting question
is why so many media bosses remain committed to diversity strategies. There is a
genuine mystery here. Do they really believe what they're saying? Do they
fear that they will be judged racist or sexist if they demand only equal-opportunity
hiring and insist on objectivity in reporting? Do they fear lawsuits, or is
it just that they find it hard to stand up to the new militants in the newsroom?
One might assume, at a minimum, that managers would insist on retaining the
right to manage. Also that publishers and senior editors would retain a fair
amount of leverage over newsroom partisans clinging to what look to be some
of the most desirable jobs in the land.
Mr. McGowan nowhere squarely
confronts these questions. But he leaves you suspecting, at the
end of this
devastating critique, that many media managers are utterly
sincere when they
claim to be on the right track now. That is the most depressing
possibility
of all.
Mr. Seligman is a contributing
editor of Forbes.
End<{{{
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