Political Correctness, Diversity Obsessions and Other Reasons Why America Distrusts Its Media.

by William McGowan author, Coloring The News

(Remarks delivered to the Pacific Research Institute San Francisco 4-8-02)

In the weeks and months after Sept 11, American news organizations aggressively reported on what they called a spasm of "anti Muslim fervor". This, many news organizations insisted, had resulted in "an explosion of hate crimes" against scapegoated Muslims, Arabs and South Asians.

One such case was that Ahmad Saad Nasim a student at Arizona State University. On September 13, Nasim claimed to have been attacked by a gang of white assailants who screamed "Die, Muslim die!".

The claim was given considerable state and national media coverage and resulted in more than 50 fearful Muslim students leaving the ASU campus.

Another case involved a young Somali man in Washington State, found bludgeoned and beaten to death beneath a bridge in a rural county. This crime too automatically set off accusations from rights organizations that hate was at the root.

In reality though, the case of Ahmad Saad Nasim was classic "cry wolf." After a second alleged bias attack—this time, Nasim was found bound and gagged in a university library—the alleged “victim” confessed to police to having fabricated the first assault— and staging the library incident as well.

As for the unfortunate death of the Somali immigrant, this alleged victim of hateful Americans was actually beaten to death by fellow Somalis. After a night of drinking, they had grown angry at him when he had urinated on a floor of a drug dealers house and tried to walk out with a pocketful of the dealer’s music CD’s.

In fact, right now seven months after the 9-11 attacks, law enforcement authorities say that there is no evidence that many of the killings associated with the wave of "hate" were part of a post 9-11 backlash against people from the Middle East, driven by anti Arab or anti Muslim bias.

Indeed, the notion that there has been a rash of retaliatory murders across the country, some investigators say, is an urban myth driven by anti discrimination campaigners, sensational media reports and traumatized crime victims seeking some explanation for senseless acts of violence."

Although activists and press lackeys still bandy about all sorts of statistics which bolster their claim of "hate" all over America, officially, only one death has been labelled a hate crime: a Sikh mistaken for an Arab.

The media’s erroneous reporting on the wave of “anti Muslim fervor”, however, is only the most recent example of journalistic misrepresentation—misrepresentation verging on fraud—involving sensitive national issues bound up with our changing demography and with changing cultural tides.

Americans dislike the media for many reasons but one of the chief reasons is the narrow, politically correct orthodoxy and the pronounced conformity of thought that has characterized too much of the media’s reporting on race, immigration, gays rights, feminism and affirmative action for most of the last decade.

Obsessed by a crusade to increase diversity in its own ranks, the press has projected that worthy goal onto its reporting of these diversity related issues.

This has seriously warped news coverage and news analysis which ought to be as candid, unbiased and complete as possible, especially at this crossroads moment in our nation’s history when we face a variety of bewildering social and cultural challenges and the ground literally is shifting beneath our feet.

Americans dislike the media because the media has been an unreliable guide—and because the guide insults them along the way.

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On race for example, the journalistic script downplays the value and accomplishments of integration and encourages the kind of cultural relativism and double standards which makes it hard to explore the more troubling realities of underclass dysfunction in this country with the candor and completeness required.

Additionally, the script on race also tends to mute the reporting on unflatter ing incidents of black racism and black anti-Semitism, minimizing or ignoring altogether the very troubling reality that blacks are many times more likely to commit violence crimes against whites than the reverse.

In 1997, in one of the more brutal incidents of interracial violence in this country, three white teenagers from rural Michigan ended up in a black neighborhood in Flint Michigan and were set upon by a gang of black youths.

One of the boys was shot to death and the girl in the group was raped. A minor, one day news story, this attack achieved little national prominence and quickly disappeared.

A year before in 1996 though when it appeared that US Army Special Forces at Fort Bragg might be painting swastikas on the doors of black soldiers, the story grabbed banner headlines and received broad network attention. The story faded only when it was revealed that the culprit was a black soldier.

At times this willingness to see racism everywhere has led the press to rush off and cry wolf where facts don’t merit it, to play into the hands of racial arsonists with agendas, and to deny the facts of racial progress to justify the continuation of racial preferences.

Although the facts behind the 1996 wave of arson attacks on black churches in the South were complicated, for instance, news organizations were quick to declare that Mississippi was burning once again.

Yet when contradictory facts emerged in isolated corrective reporting, newspapers, TV and newsmagazines did not devote the space or attention they should have to them. This left behind the impression that we still had not progressed that far from the racism of 1963.

 Meanwhile, the press is fixated on the idea of rampant and irredeemable institutional white racism, particularly in the criminal justice system, where white police racism is assumed and facts to the contrary take a backseat.

A case in point was the alarmist reporting in the wake of the 1999 Amadou Diallo shooting in New York, when the New York Times tried to paint a pi cture of minority citizens being just as threatened by racist police as by criminals the police were trying to neuter.

Although the available facts and data on police shootings actually suggested that the police just then were more restrained than in recent memory, the Times painted a picture of white police out of control.

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On immigration, journalists have tended to embrace a highly romantic, sentimental and historically distorted script which assumes immigration to be an unqualified blessing and minimizes its downsides.

This script deliberately skirts key questions, such as "how many immigrants are good for the country? And how should they fit in?

When the press poses such questions at all it does so in only the most superficial fashion, airbrushing realities that might encourage a justifiable curbing of enthusiasm.

News organizations have been particularly remiss on reporting problems associated with the chaos of the immigration system itself, especially the implications for national security.

Although the holes and weaknesses in the immigration system that the hijackers exploited on 9-11, such as the lapses that made it easy for the hijackers to come in under false identities— were well known to immigration reformers and law enforcement officials for years, journalists tended not to assign these massive problems any priority.

September 11 was largely a failure of intelligence and law enforcement.

But such journalistic malpractice certainly contributed to the state of unreadiness we found ourselves in on that tragic day last fall.

To be fair, since September 11, news organizations have done a lot of catch-up reporting, exploring our immigration system’s weaknesses in considerable and often depressing detail.

But a politically correct script survives in the form of hypersensitivity and solicitude toward Muslims and Arabs in America, immigrants and visitors alike.

Such solicitude and oversensitivity is particularly sharp when it comes to the question of "loyalty".

A story that could be done, and which has not, has been the significant underrepresentation of Muslims in the service. (According to the Pentagon there are only 4000 Muslims in the entire armed forces, in a country with a Muslim population edging over 4 million.)

This severe underrepresentation could serve as a journalistic springboard to discuss the problem of dual loyalty or Muslim resistance to "Americanization", but it has not.

The journalistic solicitude is also quite pronounced, as mentioned earlier, in stories alleging supposed American "xenophobia."

In a week when it could have done some investigative reporting about the manhunt for the 100 terrorist suspects the FBI couldn’t locate at that time, or about the issues associated with detainees who would not cooperate, the October 21st New York Times Magazine preferred to run a 3000+ word piece about the "Kafka-esque " ordeal of a "soulful"-eyed Saudi radiologist in Texas.

That doctor had spent 13 days in federal detention before being released with no charges, which became an opportunity for the New York Times writer to bash America as a whole. The radiologist’s detention, the Texas director of the ACLU told the writer "makes those of us Arabs and Muslims who are American think, Are we living in a country as dirty as the ones we ran from?" There is also the absurd parallel that many in the media have drawn between the effort on the part of law enforcement officers to track down terrorists and stop further attacks and the internment of Japanese-American citizens in World War II.

Detaining non citizen Middle eastern visitors, many in violation of visa status is a far cry from the ugly act of putting Asian American citizens away for the duration. The public, particularly that part of the public who lived through that time in history, is right to scoff.

The crowd that booed Sacramento Bee publisher Janis Besler Heaphy off the stage back in December for claiming that post 9-11 America had entered into some kind of civil liberties dark age was rude to do that.

But Heaphy was ridiculous.

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In the coverage of gay rights there is a decided partisan edge that filters out realities and facts that might undercut the gay rights cause.

Although it prides itself on understanding nontraditional cultures, such as that of gay people, American journalism shows far less readiness or ability to extend respect to or curiosity about traditional cultures, like those of the military and the Church.

The script on gays also tends to depict any objections to gay causes—however well-grounded in constitutional, moral or institutional traditions—as outright bigotry to be portrayed cartoonishly.

"A lot of gay activists think that any point of view different from theirs is not only wrong, but so illegitimate and beneath contempt that it doesn’t even deserve to be considered," notes Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe, who has run afoul of gay newsroom monitors. "I know up front that if I want to write about this topic, I have to be prepared to run a gauntlet and to jump a lot of hurdles—not among the readers who I think mostly agree with me, but right here in the newsroom."

One blazing example of skewed reporting concerns the coverage of the gays in the military controversy. In 1998 for instance, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story profiling an anonymous, closeted gay marine captain. The officer, said the Times Magazine writer, was seeking early retirement because he found the current "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy too confining.

This, the writer asserted, represented a waste of military talent and a waste of expensive training, all because gays could not serve openly. The officer, the writer said was a complete "straight arrow"—a Marine first and a gay men second. In fact he was a prude. The little he knew about gay sexual underworld he found wearying empty.

Two weeks later though, the officer was outed by a national gay publication, The Advocate. Far from being a straight arrow, the Advocate reported, he had an active side career moonlighting as a gay porno film star.

Still more skewed news values could be seen in the disparate treatment given to two relatively recent gay-related murders.

In 1998, Matthew Shepard a young gay man in Wyoming was brutally attacked by two homophobic thugs and left to die, tied to a fence post in subfreezing temperatures. That story, quite properly, became a nationwide media sensation.

But not long after in 1999, a 13 year old boy named Jesse Dirkhising is sadistically raped for hours, then left to die by the gay couple who lived next door to the boy and his single mother. The very news organizations who promoted the Shepard story so heavily—The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, CBS and NBC— ignore this second story entirely.

Still another manifestation of partisan coverage involves the refusal on the part of many news organizations to acknowledge that homosexuality plays a role in the current sex abuse scandal rocking the Catholic Church. 90% of the cases of abuse that have come to light involve priests exploiting teen age boys, not girls. And as more stories come to light, it seems that the threat of blackmail kept many Church leaders—themselves with skeletons in their closet—from hitting clerical malefactors, many of them gay— harder than they did. Yet the news media is staunch, taking cues from the gay lobby in asserting that homosexuality is not involved and the Church’s discussion of screening out homosexuals from the priesthood amounts to a “witch hunt.”

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In terms of bias though, no issue bears the mark of the new diversity orthodoxy more than the emotionally divisive subject of affirmative action and other issues linked to the politics of racial preference.

The ideological slant came through starkly in slanted coverage of the 1996 California Civil Rights Initiative, also known as Proposition 209, which successfully rolled back racial preferences in public sector hiring and the state’s higher education system.

At the very beginning of that initiative, for instance, the new York Times Sunday Magazine ran a long admiring article identifying Patrick Chavis a black doctor in Los Angeles as evidence that affirmative action in medical schools was working it was meant to, by bringing good doctors into minority neighborhoods.

But two years later, after Chavis maimed several patients and killed another and the state yanked his medical license for egregious malpractice, the New York Times, as well as other news organizations who had also put Chavis on a pedestal as an affirmative action hero, never reported it.

The ideological slant also came through just as starkly in 1997, in the hysterical tone to the much-hyped, and erroneous "Resegregation of Higher Education" story.

Contrary to what so many journalists predicted, steps to end racial preferences in university admissions did not result in "lily-white" campuses. On some university campuses, minority enrollments did go down.

But on others they went up. And as reported just last week, the system as a whole has just about as many minority students than before preferences were banned.

As in so many instances, the sky did not fall.

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The reasons behind this egregious miscoverage, and hence the public’s antipathy, are various.

But a quick examination show a media at odds with most of mainstream of American society and how it thinks, lives and worships.

Although the public is diverse in its political leanings, journalists are f ar more liberal, and are getting even more so.

According to various surveys comparing opinions and attitudes of reporters and editors to those of the population at large, journalists are overwhelmingly in favor of affirmative action

(81% of journalists say they favor it compared to only 51 of the general public),

Journalists are in favor of abortion on demand at a much higher rate than non-journalists (51% to 33%).

The press is also largely pro- immigration, and are overwhelmingly supportive of gay and lesbian issues. According to a 1995 Los Angeles Times poll, only 41% of the public thought homosexuality morally acceptable while 83% of the media thought so.

The problem is not an active liberal conspiracy, as some conservatives charge, with left wingers conspiring around the water cooler to cock that day’s news.

Rather it is one of an invisible liberal consensus, which is either hostile to, or simply unaware of , the other side of things, thereby making the newsroom susceptible to unconscious but deeply rooted bias.

Not helping matters is the increasing social narrowness of the profession. Although diversity enthusiasts talk a good deal about the class component of the "race, gender, class" triad, news organizations have not made much of an effort to target people from working class backgrounds of any color—black, yellow, brown or white— in their outreach efforts.

Although the "gritty" days of the old Front Page are overly romanticized, journalists then did have roots in working class communities, which gave them an automatic understanding of the public’s political and cultural center of gravity.

But today’s journalists, whatever their color, gender or backgrounds, are largely brought up and educated in an insular upper middle class universe disconnected from people who bear diversity’s burdens more heavily.

Another estranging factor is a lack of military service. Like much of elite America, newsroom don’t have a lot of military veterans in their ranks.

This has discouraged an appreciation for the harder realities of life in the service, the uniqueness of military culture, and just how hard it is to prepare for war and fight it.

Journalists also tend to lack devotion to religious traditions, or exposure to people who have it.

In fact, much of elite journalism is hostile to "people of faith"—even to those who might be working alongside them. A national organization of Christian journalists held their annual convention in secret in a foreign country last year, with attendees forbidden to divulge to anyone outside the conference who the attendees and speakers were as some feared losing their jobs . Compare this to the invitations news executives eager to show their commitment to diversity receive to the annual conventions of black, Latino, gay, Asian and Native American journalists who know no such anxiety.

This anxiety is not misplaced, and is even more well-earned when it comes to dissidents who challenge orthodoxy on diversity or make charges of bias.

Journalism is a profession that prides itself on its maverick outspokenness and its free-spirited regard for skepticism. Yet in today’s climate the subject of bias is practically a taboo.

"I deplore the fact that the issue is so sensitive that reporters don’t want to talk by name" said one Washington bureau chief, when I approached him to talk about diversity and the ideological bias it encourages. he hastened to add: " I don’t want to contribute to that but I would rather not be noted by name either".

Indeed, in many ways news organizations have become the same kind of dysfunctional cultures as those on the campuses of the multicultural university, where transgressions against the dominant line of thought can result in blackballing and ostracism. This may sound like hypocrisy—and it is.

Indeed, dissenters run great risks and are targets of irrational condemnation.

Just look at how journalistic pooh-bahs have responded to Bernard Goldberg’s insider account of his years at CBS, BIAS. Goldberg was "a second string (some say second rate) newsman at CBS" who took early retirement "because he couldn’t make it to the top.", Al Neurath, founder of USA Today cattily observed.

In fact though, the critics might have the last laugh.

A growing percentage of alienated middle class news consumers have embraced conservative talk radio—arguably the Frankenstein monster made by the PC press. Indeed talk radio shows have proliferated wildly, and FOX News is number one in cable. As declining readership and network news ratings suggest, if it finds the mainstream press lacking, the public will simply find its own sources of information.

Goldberg’s BIAS was a number one bestseller. My own book about political correctness in the media, COLORING THE NEWS is enjoying unexpectedly brisk sales too.

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This doesn’t mean there are not causes for concern.

Instead of making public discourse more intellectually sophisticated the journalistic propaganda on diversity has helped to dumb it down.

Instead of nurturing a sense of public cooperation where the public feels the bonds and obligations of shared citizenship, the emphasis on diversity has discouraged it by celebrating ethnic differences and supporting a race-conscious approach to public life.

And instead of enhancing public trust—a critical element in the forging of a public consensus on the thorny issues at hand— the press’s diversity effort has discouraged it.

Reporting and analysis distorted by double standards, intellectual dishonesty and fashionable cant that favors certain groups over others actually crimps the very debate it purports to enhance.

As one perceptive reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle reflected: "The ultimate goal is a society with as much racial and ethnic fairness and harmony as possible, but we can’t get there unless we in the press are ready to talk about it in full."

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