New York Post, 7-25-2002

Page Six
By Richard Johnson With Paula Froelich And Chris Wilson

Times editor: Color him red

New York Times executive editor Howell Raines was forced to sit and watch as Bill McGowan accepted a National Press Club award Monday night for “Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism” - a book the Times refused to review.

Raines was one of 200 journalists at the club’s annual awards dinner in Washington, D.C., because his son Ben Raines, a reporter for the Mobile Alabama Register, won an award for environmental reporting.

As he arrived with his live-in girlfriend, Krystyna Stachowiak, the Times honcho was made aware of McGowan’s presence by a handful of demonstrators from the National Assn. of Hispanic Journalists, who were handing out fliers attacking his book.

Juan Gonzalez, the Daily News columnist who heads the Hispanic group, said in a statement: “This insulting book is a poorly argued indictment of the need to ensure diversity in America’s newsrooms.” The Washington Post’s Richard Prince ripped it as full of “half-truths, spin and inaccuracies and is not worthy of an award.”

One handout accused McGowan of “calling for a return to the days when the only minorities in a newsroom were emptying the waste baskets.”

The protests, led by the National Assn. of Black Journalists, forced the club’s board of governors to consider rescinding McGowan’s award. Scoffed one McGowan supporter: “What they really should be protesting is their public school education which didn’t prepare them to read this book.”

McGowan actually applauds efforts to increase the number of minority journalists, but deplores the effects he says it’s had on many newsrooms: political conformity, ethnic hypersensitivity and racial favoritism.

During pre-dinner cocktails, Raines avoided McGowan, who has complained loudly and often about the way the Times has ignored his book. “It was very awkward,” said one witness. “It was like a showdown at the OK Corral.”

In accepting his award for media criticism, McGowan thanked the National Press Club. Looking at Raines, he said, “It would have been easy to turn an eye of polite indifference to this book as some in the profession have done.”

As for the protesters, “they’ve totally ignored what the book said and engaged in the worst kind of racial McCarthyism and race-baiting,” McGowan said. “It’s too bad we operate in a journalistic culture where such ill-informed accusations have to be taken seriously.”

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