Coloring the News:
How Crusading for Diversity
Has Corrupted American Journalism

Preface

In June 1995, with racial preferences under the first barrage of a populist attack that would continue the rest of the decade, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story headlined “What Happened To The Case For Affirmative Action?” Written by journalist Nicholas Lemann, author of an award-winning book on race called Promised Land, the nine-thousand-word article stood out from most reportage devoted to this contentious issue in its detail and the depth of its historical analysis.

Despite its attempts to summon a tone of scholarly detachment, however, Lemann’s article was hardly neutral in its politics. Complaining that the case for affirmative action was not a simple one to make, the piece was clearly an attempt to rally the troops and to offer loyalists an ideological action plan. Explaining that affirmative action had become so vulnerable because a serious public debate about it had never taken place, Lemann wrote: “As far as the public discourse goes, the next move is affirmative action’s supporters to make. They need to acknowledge and confront the other side’s position and then explain why, nonetheless, America should still support affirmative action programs.”

Lemann rested much of his case on a then-forty-one-year-old African-American doctor in southern California named Patrick Chavis. In 1975, Chavis had been one of five black students admitted to the University of California at Davis Medical School under a special minority preference program that would later be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision. Raised in poverty by a single mother, Chavis had returned to the ghetto after graduating to establish a thriving OB/GYN practice serving poor people in the blighted Los Angeles suburb of Compton.

To Lemann, Chavis was affirmative action personified—a living and breathing refutation of the conservative claim that racial preferences favored unqualified minorities over better-qualified whites. If Chavis had not gotten into medical school, Lemann wrote, “his patients wouldn’t be treated by some better qualified white obstetrician, they would have no doctor at all, and their babies would be delivered the way Chavis was, by whoever happened to be on duty at the emergency room of the county hospital.”

By contrast there was Allan Bakke himself, the medical school applicant whose college grades and board scores made him the “better qualified” candidate whose place Chavis had taken. Bakke had eventually also gotten into the UC Davis medical school courtesy of the 1978 Supreme Court ruling. But according to Lemann, he had not “set the world on fire as a doctor.” After completing a residence in anesthesiology at the Mayo Clinic, Bakke, Lemann condescendingly noted, moved to Minnesota where “he had no private practice,” and worked on an interim basis rather than as a staff physician at an obscure community college. To underscore the contrast to Chavis, who was photographed for the magazine’s cover in hospital scrubs cradling a black baby he had just delivered, Bakke was photographed in shirtsleeves, carrying a briefcase as he walked across a parking lot.

Lemann used Chavis to illustrate one of his article’s main points: that a meritocratic system based on measurements of aptitude like the SATs and medical boards is not just a denial of opportunity to individuals but a “denial of talent to society.” Unless “merit” systems like medical school admissions accommodated the diversity that an individual like Chavis represented, there was no other choice but to rely on preferences to provide minority communities with the professionals they would not otherwise have.

Chavis also provided Lemann with a means to boost affirmative action as a corrective to enduring white racism. Although conservatives liked to talk about a colorblind society, according to Lemann, “Chavis sees the old fashioned kind of racial discrimination everywhere”: in the refusal of the Bank of America to give him a loan to build a house in Compton; in the decision of Long Beach Memorial Hospital to put him under professional review; in the fact that the IRS and state tax authorities had launched audits into his finances. These were not accidents, Chavis alleged, a charge that Lemann echoed.

After the beatification by the Times Magazine, Patrick Chavis became a symbol for supporters of affirmative action and was featured in a number of glowing media profiles during the bitter 1996 campaign for the California Civil Rights Initiative, or Proposition 209. According to The Nation, Chavis had an exemplary record in “providing primary care to poor women.” Although Allan Bakke’s scores were higher, the magazine asked, “Who made the most of his medical school education? From whom did California taxpayers benefit more?” Chavis also became the subject of partisan political rhetoric. According to Senator Ted Kennedy, who hailed him before the Senate Labor and Human relations Subcommittee, he was the “perfect example” of affirmative action beneficiaries who later in life “are likely to benefit their professions and the communities in which they live.”

Two years after Nicholas Lemann’s piece first appeared, however, those portraying Patrick Chavis as a poster boy for racial preferences saw their efforts blow up in their faces. On June 19, 1997, the California Medical Board suspended his license to practice medicine, citing his “inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician.” Finding him guilty of gross negligence and incompetence in the cases of three patients—one of whom had died—California Administrative Law Judge Samuel Reyes said that letting him “continue in the practice of organized medicine will endanger the public health, safety and welfare.” Soon after, the Los Angeles District Attorney announced that Chavis was the object of a criminal investigation.

According to medical board investigators, Chavis had engaged in egregious malpractice while performing liposuction procedures on patients in a body-sculpting practice he had started as a side business after taking a cosmetic surgery seminar in Beverly Hills. For doctors looking for easy cash, liposuction had become a lucrative and largely unregulated business, and Chavis’s New Attitude Body Sculpting had flourished, even in hardbitten Compton. But the four day short course Chavis had attended left him inadequately prepared to handle complications. Patients who lived told harrowing tales of Chavis’s post operative neglect when the procedures he had performed went bad.

After one botched procedure, Chavis stashed a patient in his home instead of admitting her to the hospital. Abandoning her for nearly forty hours, the doctor refused to return the frantic phone calls of the patient, who lost nearly 70% of her blood and was admitted to a hospital with a severe abdominal infection. A second patient told an almost identical story: a botched liposuction, massive internal bleeding, and Chavis’s almost inhuman indifference to her suffering. A third patient was not as lucky. After another botched procedure, Chavis left her in his office for four and half hours, her blood pressure plummeting from severe abdominal hemorrhage, which left his clinic floor puddled with blood. By nightfall she was in cardiac arrest and died while her husband rushed her to the hospital.

Medical board investigators also heard from a doctor who had worked with Chavis. Citing “poor impulse control and sensitivity to patients’ pain,” the doctor gave investigators a tape recording of patients screaming horrifically, with Chavis responding, “Don’t talk to the doctor while he is working,” and, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” In addition, Chavis refused to take responsibility for anything that had happened to his patients. According to investigators, at one point Chavis said that it was the husband of the dead patient who should be brought up on charges, claiming that he had picked her up and put her into a wheelchair after surgery in violation of procedure. At another point he said he was the victim of a racist medical system that didn’t like to see a black doctor do well.

Whether Chavis’s egregious professional misconduct was an indictment of the affirmative action policies that launched him in his medical career more than twenty years before, or just the tragic meltdown of an individual with personal problems was debatable. But after having set him up as such a model for “diversity” in university admissions, news organizations should have at least felt an obligation to report the sequel to the story. Indeed, as most journalists freely admitted when I spoke to them about the case, if it had been Alan Bakke who was caught in such flagrant malpractice the press would have been all over the story without questioning the newsworthiness of such a development. But most of the media—print and broadcast, local and national—ducked the tragic denouement of the Patrick Chavis story.

The Los Angeles Times, which had profiled Chavis in glowing terms as a victim of white racism several years before, reported Chavis’s suspension, as well as the gruesome details behind it when the story first broke. But it took more than two months for the paper to identify him as the same Dr. Patrick Chavis who allegedly made the case for affirmative action. And even when it did get around to tackling that angle of the story, the LA Times did so in the most anguished and ambiguous terms, giving space to defenders of affirmative action who rejected the notion that Chavis’s downfall stood for anything larger than one man’s weakness and allowing Chavis himself to call the official sanctions against him “a lynching.” The same was true of the Washington Post, which ran nothing about the Chavis case in its national news pages, but did run a snide op-ed piece disparaging those who would make the Chavis case “a cautionary tale” about the danger of racial preference.

The New York Times itself, however, committed the most glaring journalistic malpractice. Of course the Times Magazine, which printed Nicholas Lemann’s encomium about Chavis before the gruesome news about his liposuction patients can be forgiven for not seeing into the future. One might wonder, though, whether Lemann, in setting Chavis up as a symbol, was overly credulous in evaluating the black doctor’s Albert Schweitzer-like boasts, as well as in accepting the accusations of racism he made against loan officers and tax authorities. One might also ask whether a writer less ideologically committed to affirmative action might have discovered Chavis’s darker side as a result of more dogged and objective reporting. (A lot of the testimony considered at Chavis’s license revocation hearing for instance involved a pattern of behavior that had occurred well before the Times Magazine piece was published.)

Should Lemann have informed the magazine of subsequent findings? More to the point, shouldn’t he have published something to correct the impression his original piece had left with its readers? But even if it could be argued that such a follow-up was tactically impossible in a weekly insert, what of the daily NY Times’s decision to completely ignore the Chavis malpractice story when it broke? Although Chavis literally now had blood dripping on his hands, the NY Times ran nothing to amend their false portrait of an affirmative action hero, or question the legitimacy of the race-conscious social policy that had made him a doctor. A riveting, nationally newsworthy story central to the country’s discussion of racial preferences somehow ended up completely falling through the cracks.

*****

In July 1999, several thousand minority journalists gathered in Seattle for a convention called Unity 99. Jointly sponsored by the country’s Black, Latino, Asian American, and Native American journalists associations, Unity 99 was underwritten with the generous assistance of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the major network news organizations, and other powers of American corporate journalism. For five days, the attendees participated in a series of plenary sessions and panel discussions on topics important to the cause of minority representation in the news business. The Unity convention also doubled as a minority jobs fair, with news executives from around the country recruiting fresh new “faces of color” or poaching veterans from rivals. In fact, the minority jobs fair at Unity was the biggest jobs fair of any kind in the history of American journalism, a sign of the importance news organizations attach to the diversity movement.

Unity 99 was the successor to an earlier minority journalists’ gathering, which took place five years before in Atlanta. Like its predecessor, Unity 99 boasted a variety of media luminaries such Carole Simpson and Farai Chideya of ABC News, and Ray Suarez, then of NPR’s Talk of the Nation and now at PBS’s Newshour with Jim Lehrer, as well as some of the top print editors in the country, including Len Downie of the Washington Post, Mark Whittiker of Newsweek, Howell Raines of the New York Times, and Norman Pearlstein of Time-Warner. Unity 99’s parties and receptions, too, were lavish and glittering, with generous corporate benefactors—Knight-Ridder, Times-Mirror, Gannett, to name but a few of the more than 200 media corporations showing their flags there—providing nothing but the best in the hospitality suites of Seattle’s best hotels and restaurants.

As they did at its predecessor—and at nearly nearly every other news industry gathering for most of the last decade—Unity 99 convention participants loudly affirmed diversity as crucially important in bringing the news industry in line with the country’s fast-changing racial and ethnic demographics and ensuing sensitivity to minority communities often offended by organizations allegedly riddled with white majoritarian biases. The news business, largely perceived as not doing enough to promote diversity, was just as loudly scolded, especially as the year 2000 loomed and promises of ethnic and racial proportionalism in newsrooms having fallen far short of the participants’ expectations. 

In these professional gatherings, where diversity is regarded as given, people rarely stand up to challenge its driving assumptions, or to question its journalistic impact. There may be a handful of dissenters here and there, but the criticisms they make are generally dismissed as reactionary grumblings from an old guard that needs to get out of the way; the facts they cite in their arguments just don’t seem to be heard. Questions raising the relationship between the easy acceptance of the politics of diversity and journalistic train wrecks, like the Patrick Chavis story, are unwelcome and the pariahs of professional introspection. A spirit of political advocacy and ethnic activism rules. As Kara Briggs, president of the Native American Journalist Association, insisted in one Unity-related interview: “I was born into a tribe, not a newspaper.”

Not that there were not plenty of opportunities to probe all sides of these complicated diversity-related issues. Times-Mirror, for example, sponsored a session called “Balance or Bias: Affirmative Action and The News Media.” According to its promotional literature, the point of the panel was “to develop a report card” on the way affirmative action was being covered.

But the panel was comprised of nine supporters of affirmative action who easily overwhelmed the two opponents. One of the supporters was Farai Chideya, an ABC News correspondent who often reports on racial matters. Warning of incipient “de facto apartheid,” she said that supporters of I-200, a 1998 Washington State ballot initiative that banned race as a factor in public-sector hiring, had won a victory similar to that of Afrikaners in pre-Mandela South Africa. Instead of a detached inquiry into the professional quality of the coverage of affirmative action, the panel was almost wholly concerned with the politics of the issue, and roundly resisted unwelcome questions that might throw doubt on the issue itself and the way American journalism as a whole tends to report on it.

This book represents an effort on my part to pose these unwelcome questions missing in the initial coverage of Patrick Chavis and at Unity 99, and to raise intelligent dissent about the disturbing conformity that has spread over the journalistic community. For most of the 1990s I have been intrigued by journalism’s attempts to deal with the issue of diversity and have followed efforts at major news organizations all around the country. While it has been interesting to see the effects on the internal workings of the newsroom itself, I have also been most curious about the impact that diversity is having on news coverage itself, particularly coverage of what might be called “diversity issues” of immigration, race, gay rights, feminism, and affirmative action. I think it is fair to say that these are the most important social issues facing the country—the core of what the pundits call “the culture wars.” Has diversity helped or hindered American journalism’s ability to make sense of them, and by extension, American society’s ability to come to terms with them?

Given the industry’s past sins of racial, ethnic, and cultural exclusion, the steps it has taken to enhance minority representation in newsrooms and in news coverage represent a worthy, overdue, and historically necessary effort. But after nearly a decade of monitoring the way that the nation’s most important news organizations cover these issues, I would say that the drive for greater diversity has failed to yield better journalism, and that this has negative implications for American society’s growth as a multicultural society.

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 at the point when the discourse about our changing national identity needs to be robust, well-informed, and honest. Instead of fostering detached, neutral reporting and analysis, the diversity mandate has given us advocacy. With the cultural topography of the country shifting beneath our feet, we need a press capable of framing essential questions and providing honest, candid, and dependable answers. But the diversity-driven journalism we are getting has not done this, a failure that has consequences for our policy responses and our politics and our national conversation.

Most of those critical of the news industry’s diversity effort have been conservatives upset at what they consider skewed reporting. But liberals should be dismayed as well, although for different reasons. In fact, the identity politics that diversity journalism favors is not at all the “progressive” force its champions like to insist it is. Driven by an ethos that diminishes the importance of assimilation and integration—values that progressives first championed at the turn of the century and again during the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s—diversity contributes to liberalism’s intellectual stagnation.

Neither a conservative nor a liberal, I consider myself a pragmatist deeply committed to a frank and fair rendering of facts, to an intellectually honest, balanced debate about controversial diversity-related issues, and to the ideal of objectivity, which has come under fire in journalism and in the post-modern, multicultural university. Even if you are ideologically predisposed to pro-diversity political positions, I’d like to think that the facts I have marshaled will convince you that the journalism I have scrutinized has a slant to it, and that this slant may not be such a good thing for our country.  I believe the public deserves unbiased information to help it through the democratic decisions it needs to make—and that journalism has an obligation to put aside its own political biases in the process of providing that information. Our press needs to rediscover a reverence for “armed neutrality in the face of doctrines,” as the philosopher William James once phrased it. To the extent that it has not done this, and to the extent that the diversity crusade plays a role in that failure, there is a cause for concern—and a purpose for this book.