Investor’s Business Daily, 2-7-2002

Author Asks: Is Truth Victim Of Media Diversity Crusade?
By David Isaac

In April 1995, Time magazine ran a story about the first coed cruise aboard the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower. It was an eventful cruise.

Fifteen women were evacuated due to pregnancy, a female sailor made false claims of sexual assault and male and female crew members videotaped their illicit trysts. Time's conclusion? "The mission was a resounding success."

It's one of the examples in William McGowan's book, "Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism." Meticulous and sharply written, McGowan's book documents how the media's well-intentioned pursuit of diversity has proved a disaster, squelching debate on the key cultural issues of our time, from race and gender to immigration. "

In a perverse Orwellian twist, instead of expanding the bandwidth of opinion, experience, and perspectives that are acknowledged in news coverage and commentary, diversity-oriented journalism has actually allowed a narrow multicultural orthodoxy to restrict debate just when the discourse about our changing national identity needs to be robust, well informed and honest," McGowan writes.

Writing the book has been "a vivid illustration of its thesis," he said.

Numerous liberal foundations rejected his requests for grants. His manuscript complete, he had to find a new publisher after his first pulled out. And although the book was well received by one of the newspapers he criticizes, The Washington Post, which likened it to George Orwell's social essays, it has yet to be reviewed by The New York Times.

To top it off, actor Marlon Brando called to complain to PBS TV station KCET in Los Angeles for putting McGowan on the air. Investor's Business Daily recently spoke with the author.

IBD: What prompted you to write this book?

McGowan: First, my experience in South Asia as a front-line war reporter, where I saw ethnic conflict up close. I became attuned to identity politics. After that, I returned to New York and (Mayor) David Dinkins' "gorgeous mosaic." There were the Crown Heights riots in 1991 and the Washington Heights riots of 1992. I realized the press, particularly the prestige press, were airbrushing some of the more unflattering features from the coverage of the events.

At that time, there was the big liberal groundswell proclaiming the glories of diversity and multiculturalism. I was taken aback, because I thought the press would be more skeptical. Instead, the press became cheerleaders. I realized that the diversity movement inside the media, in the form of efforts to increase the ranks of minority journalists to enhance the sensitivity with which news organizations report minority issues, was making it difficult to report about diversity in society at large.

 IBD: During the coverage of the 1996 black church arson, the media accepted without question that there was a new wave of racist violence. When this proved untrue, the media were slow to correct the error. Why?

McGowan: On any issue this has historically been a problem. The accusation is on page one and the correction on page 27. In this case, it was intensified because there was such moral outrage. The media are heavily invested in a script based on the old civil rights paradigm of an institutionally racist nation victimizing blacks. It defines their collective worldview. It's difficult to break that script, even in the face of vivid, contradictory evidence.

In the case of the church burnings, it happened in the context of the first broad societal inspection of affirmative action policies. There was a statewide anti-affirmative action referendum in California, and cases in the federal courts and up to the Supreme Court. The church burnings were invoked as 'The specter of white racism rides again,' and were used to justify continuing affirmative action policies.

It was a two-part thing, with the amount of racism exaggerated to affirm a script that assumes enduring white racism, and also to shore up support for beleaguered affirmative action programs.

IBD: You say diversity lays down a cloud of intimidation in the newsroom. Does that intimidation extend to policy and politicians?

McGowan: When you're a policy-maker and you see the media lobby through their reporting and their editorials for a particular, so-called progressive, set of policies, it makes you more reluctant to challenge those policies. It leads to their perpetuation because politicians get the signal these are sacred cows and you can't go near them.

A good example is bilingual education. Bilingual education in California was a joke. Everybody out there knew it was destructive. Latino parents were opposed because they wanted their kids to learn English. They didn't want them in mandatory Spanish instruction classes. But for 20 years there was absolutely no statewide assessment of bilingual education programs, much less an effort to roll them back.

Politicians didn't want to take on that issue. They assumed there was huge Hispanic support for it. There wasn't. The newspapers never delved into the nitty-gritty of the workings of the policy, which would have scandalized most readers. Second, the media never examined opposition to the policies within the Hispanic community itself.

I document a case where there was a boycott of a school district in a Latino neighborhood and the L.A. Times gave it the most cursory coverage. If that's not a man-bites-dog story, I don't know what is.

IBD: Would coverage of immigration issues fall along those lines?

McGowan: The greatest disservice that politically correct journalism has done to this country is that it has stunted the debate on immigration. We've moved to a de facto open-door immigration policy without ever discussing it as a nation.

This led to the lax immigration policy that let the hijackers on Sept. 11 slip in under the wire and operate here. The weaknesses in the immigration system were long ignored or denied by the press. To that extent, the press bears some responsibility for our national unreadiness on that day.

IBD: Journalists often don't even present arguments on both sides of an issue. Is that a failure of journalism school or is it incompetence?

McGowan: In "Coloring the News," most of the case studies I write about involve "bias" where the central problem is one of insufficient weight given to the opposing, usually more "conservative," point of view. But there are also many, many examples of "the other side" not being heard at all.

To be sure, journalism schools are even more encumbered by a rigid pro-diversity orthodoxy than newsrooms can be; academics are often so committed to a PC (politically correct) view of the world it's laughable. But what's really at play here is the failure of the whole diversity model of newsroom interactions.

In theory, 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, certain unfashionable or disfavored voices are overlooked or muted, and certain groups feel more empowered in the journalistic shouting match than others.

IBD: Why does diversity in the newsroom hurt the liberal causes these journalists espouse?

McGowan: It's not that diversity in the newsroom per se hurts liberal causes. It's the narrow pro-diversity orthodoxy infecting news coverage that hurts liberal causes. The damage is largely unintended, and happens on a variety of levels.

Generally speaking, by siding so openly with liberal politics and liberal political priorities - racial preferences, gays in the military, etc- pro-diversity journalists deprive liberalism of the reality check it needs in order to stay intellectually and electorally viable. Refusing to rethink a lot of its outdated assumptions about race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, liberalism has lost a lot of its edge, and unless and until journalism really starts challenging those assumptions, liberalism will continue to grow more flaccid.

 IBD: Do you see a light at the end of the tunnel?

McGowan: Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. On immigration, for instance, 9-11 was a wake-up call. . Cataclysmic events like 9-11 have their sobering impacts, but we are dealing with a very strongly rooted sensibility. It has had a corrupting impact on the people who are making decisions now. They're not going to change their spots overnight.