Response to NABJ and NAHJ Protest over NPC Award to “Coloring The News.”
William McGowan, author.

Contrary to what the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists charge, COLORING THE NEWS is a solidly researched and honest work of journalism that tackles a very emotionally difficult issue and does so with balance fairness, historical perspective and compassion. Although these groups have made charges of bad scholarship and egregious factual errors, in making their case, they fail to present anything at all of any substance. As I see it, these groups don’t like the book because the book challenges the politicization of the “diversity” crusade and the politicization of their respective organizations.

What I say in COLORING THE NEWS, on page 7 of the Preface in fact, is that the diversity effort—”a worthy, overdue and historically necessary” effort— has run off the rails in its implementation. This, I say, has not been a good thing for dependable news coverage of controversial subjects. Nor has it been good for the country, particularly at this crossroads moment in our development as a multicultural society when the demographic and cultural ground is literally shifting beneath our feet and we need unbiased information to make important democratic choices. In addition I cite adverse consequences for the credibility of the news media in general, and adverse consequences for liberal causes and liberal constituent groups.

To say as Eric Deggans of the NABJ Media Monitoring Committee has said, that my book pulls us “back to the days when the only people of color in newsrooms were the folks dumping out wastebaskets and mopping floors,” is racial McCarthyism at its most stark—and most embarrassing— for those journalists of color the NABJ and the NAHJ purport to represent. Leaders of these organizations have said that COLORING THE NEWS criticizes the effort to increase the ranks of minority journalists and shows hostility to the careers of those helped by diversity efforts. In fact, I have no problem at all with this part of the crusade, as I say very explicitly in the book, in the Preface and again in Chapter One. What I do have problems with—and what I document in painful detail in the 200 pages of analysis that the NABJ and the NAHJ only cursorily attend to—is how the other dimensions of the diversity effort—ie the bid to enhance racial and ethnic sensitivity and the bid to identify and affirm “unique and distinct minority points of view”—have resulted in racial and ethnic hypersensitivity, racial and ethnic subjectivity and all the other hallmarks of what for lack of a better term we call “political correctness.”

Diversity in the newsroom, yes. Political orthodoxy and political conformity in the pursuit of “diversity ideology”, no, emphatically.

While I do take certain more “activist” journalists of color to task, anyone who actually reads the book will also see that I take to task liberal whites, especially liberal white male newsroom managers, just as much, perhaps even more. To say that I blame minority journalists alone for the faults of diversity is not so, as anyone who has read Chapter Six, can see.

As for the unsuccessful bid to get the National Press Club to rescind its award, all I have to say is that it is sad that we live in the kind of racially anxious journalistic culture where unfounded charges like those leveled by NABJ and NAHJ leaders have to be taken seriously. The faction within the NPC leadership who issued a statement expressing reservations about the book's scholarship and factual errors, you will notice, did not cite anything beyond what one NPC Board of Governors member dismissed as “arcane quibbling.”

Ultimately the pressure campaign was futile. The award was given as planned, with gusto, as the ringing defenses of the book from the Awards Dinner podium that night made clear.

William McGowan
Author, COLORING THE NEWS

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