True Colors
A new tome exposes overwhelming bias in the media.

By John Corry, a veteran of the New York Times, from the December 31, 2001, issue of National Review
January 19-20, 2002

Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, by William McGowan (Encounter, 250 pp., $25.95)

iberal delicacy has its moments. Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y., once paid the Most Reverend Prophet Alpha Omega Bondu $12,000 in state funds to drive the evil spirits from a Haitian psychiatric patient who had hacked his girlfriend to death. The Rev said the patient was afflicted by seven evil spirits, and that he had chased away four. Alert to cultural sensibilities, however, the New York Times declined to call this an exorcism; it reported that the $12,000 had been spent on "religious counseling."

As an example of journalistic malfeasance, that may not be much; by Times standards it's nothing at all. But it does hint at the problem: Whole groups and classes of supposedly oppressed people — voodoo priests among them — must be presented sympathetically in news coverage. Few in our major news organizations admit this, however, and even if they acknowledge the existence of P.C. journalism, they seem to believe it is practiced only by others. In fact, however, virtually everyone obeys the rules of the dominant P.C. culture, and makes news judgments accordingly. A dissenting judgment will be dismissed automatically as uninformed or wrongheaded, but it may also be denounced as a sign of racism, misogyny, or homophobia.

In Coloring the News, William McGowan offers a unifying theory for how this all came about: The campaign to increase newsroom diversity did it. Even if the effort was well intentioned, he says, it has had a disastrous effect on the news, especially on what might be called "diversity issues": race, gay rights, feminism, and affirmative action. It has fostered identity politics, newsroom bitterness, and a suspension of critical faculties by news organizations.

"In theory," McGowan says, "diversity is supposed to be a matter of reporters from all different ethnicities, races, genders, and sexual orientations doing their work as searchingly as possible on a wide variety of subjects, and functioning as a sort of equivalent of a representative democracy. But in practice, the regime that diversity has created does not work like this. Certain unfashionable or disfavored voices are overlooked or muted . . . and certain groups feel more empowered in the journalistic shouting match than others." Diversity measured only by skin color, gender, or sexual preference is cosmetic and superficial, and more likely to impede than stimulate the free flow of ideas.

In survey after survey, reporters and correspondents at our major news organizations overwhelmingly have identified themselves as liberal Democrats; but they insist (and seem actually to believe) that they never allow their politics to get in the way of their stories. McGowan casts serious doubt on these liberal disclaimers. He has examined the coverage of hot cultural issues, and found it thoroughly distorted and biased. The Los Angeles Times, for example, minimized any serious discussion of California's Proposition 209, which banned racial preferences, and treated it instead as an attempt to curb civil rights and as an expression of anger by white male voters. Even after Prop. 209 passed, with the support of a significant number of minority voters, the Times continued to attack it.

The coverage of California's Proposition 227, which restricted bilingual education, was similar. Rather than examine the obvious flaws in bilingual-education programs, the L. A. Times and virtually every other news organization treated Prop. 227 as a nativist plot to extinguish Latino culture. The story line barely changed even after 227 passed, with the support of many Latino voters.

The reason for this bias is quite obvious: The press is fearful of antagonizing minorities, and therefore averts its eyes from facts that might embarrass them. The New York Times, for example, has never been able to admit that open admissions have been a disaster for the once proud City College; Times columnist Bob Herbert even said that a proposal by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to scale back remedial-reading programs at the college was similar to "ethnic cleansing." And the Washington Post hesitated for years to publish critical pieces about the disastrous administration of Mayor Marion Barry.

To his credit, McGowan eschews the easy journalistic targets: Anna Quindlen and Anthony Lewis turn up only once each, Geraldo Rivera and Bryant Gumbel not at all. McGowan is less interested in media personalities than in the corporate culture of news organizations and how it distorts what ought to be a truth-seeking enterprise. The book has a great deal in it about the New York Times, for good reason: When Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. became its publisher in 1992, he called diversity "the single most important issue" facing the paper. He also vowed that the Times would no longer provide "a predominantly white straight male version of events"; if Times people were to continue doing that, he insisted, they would not be doing their duty as journalists. Sulzberger did not say whose versions of events would supplant those of the white straight males; he didn't have to. Stories on diversity issues suggest that feminists and gay and other activists are now the commisars of the copy desks.

McGowan tells us several times in Coloring the News that he's an objective journalist; perhaps he wants to escape being called a right-winger. He shouldn't have bothered. After all, as his book demonstrates, even the most biased journalist can convince himself that he's not slanting his reportage; what's important is not the writer's protestations of innocence, but whether the story he tells is true. McGowan has written a very substantial book, one that tells the truth about a very disturbing — and sadly persistent — trend in U.S. journalism.

— Mr. Corry's memoir is My Times: Adventures in the News Trade.