Commentary, February 2002

Quota Plan

Reviewed by Vincent Carroll

IN 1997, in one of the more brutal recent incidents of interracial violence in this country, three white teenagers from rural Michigan ended up in the wrong neighborhood of Flint 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. The story was picked up by the media, but did not achieve national prominence; a minor, one-day item, it quickly disappeared from those news outlets that had bothered to report it.

By contrast, in 1996, when it appeared that U.S. Army Special Forces might be painting swastikas on the doors of black soldiers in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the incident filled headlines, received network television attention, and was amplified still more when President Clinton referred to it in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. The story faded away only when it was revealed that the culprit was a black soldier.

This disparity in press coverage has become so prevalent that many readers no doubt take it for granted. What they may not comprehend, however, is its source. William McGowan, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of a previous book on a different but not entirely unrelated subject—ethnic strife in Sri Lanka—set out to explore how the media have been dealing with the contentious issues surrounding race and “diversity.” The result is Coloring the News, a book that examines the news-production process from employment practices, to the day-to-day tasks of reporting and editing stories about race, to the presentation of these stories to the general public.

THE DRIVE for “diversity” in public and private American institutions is hardly a fresh topic, but in the news business, as McGowan demonstrates, this drive has taken a particularly intensive form. In the area of hiring and firing, promotions and demotions, most if not all of the major outlets make regular use of explicit racial preferences to boost the percentage of minority journalists on their staffs. The Time-Warner chain of magazines, for example, an empire that includes not only Time but also Fortune, Sports Illustrated, People, This Old House, and dozens of other publications, has developed a system in which a portion of annual executive bonuses is explicitly linked to a manager’s success in bringing in and elevating minority employees.

The New York Times has also been aggressive: in 1991, reports McGowan, Max Frankel, then the paper’s editor, launched what he himself openly called his “own little quota plan,” the terms of which were to accelerate minority recruitment “by hiring one nonwhite for every white hired.” Frankel backed away from this scheme, settling on a subtler approach, only when it provoked an outcry.

From race-consciousness in employment it is but a small step to race-consciousness in the coverage of news. The Gannett corporation owns and operates the largest newspaper chain in the United States. In the early 1990’s, McGowan writes, editors of Gannett papers like the Des Moines Register and the Cincinnati Enquirer found themselves under fierce pressure to meet diversity goals not only in employment and training but in assigning stories, with their own performance being evaluated by the amount and type of coverage devoted to minority issues.

These editors in turn required the reporters working beneath them to “integrate positive images of minorities into news coverage and photos.” To this end, rigid numerical schemes were put in place. At one Gannett paper—the Burlington Free Press in Vermont—the editors mandated that one of every six faces in an ongoing photo feature be that of a minority. The newspaper’s leading columnist was instructed to ensure that, in his superior’s precise words, “at least one column in every four should be about a minority or address a diversity issue.”

ONE OF the justifications for this heavy emphasis on diversity at major newspapers and television stations has been that it would help produce deeper and fairer reporting. But in chapters devoted to issues ranging from immigration to affirmative action to homosexuality, McGowan shows that this is not the case at all. On the contrary, the various internal quota schemes have been accompanied by an enforced conformity of views about race. As he writes, “unfashionable or disfavored voices are overlooked or muted,” and a whole range of highly controversial issues either goes neglected or is discussed in tendentious and one-sided terms.

To take but one of McGowan’s many examples, although there has been no shortage of feature articles detailing the many contributions Latino immigrants make to the economy, their personal struggles in a new land, and their vulnerability to exploitation and abuse, it is rare to find a journalist exploring the other side of the coin: the impact of Hispanic immigrants on the wage levels and employment prospects of unskilled American workers; the implications of high Hispanic illegitimacy and dropout rates on the broader society; or the links between immigration and crime.

This record of omission and distortion speaks very poorly for the nation’s premier mainstream news organizations. “Instead of raising the tone of public discourse,” McGowan writes, “the diversity ethos has dumbed it down, blunting the public faculties for reasoned argument.” It has also created a class of journalistic malingerers, who have stood on the sidelines as others have come in with the news. Thus, at the University of Michigan, it was not a reporter at one of the state’s many newspapers but Carl Cohen, a philosophy professor (and frequent Commentary contributor) who brought to light an admissions policy based on naked racial preferences. At Georgetown, it was not one of the thousands of professional journalists in the nation’s capital but a student who broke a story about double standards in admissions at the university’s law school. When it comes to race and ethnicity, the fearless investigative spirit of the newsroom has gone derelict.

MCGOWAN'S INDICTMENT of American journalism in Coloring the News is thorough, but is not always as level-headed as one might wish. At several junctures, he objects to the media not for its biases and misjudgments but for being, of all things, too neutral, as when he faults National Public Radio for having “steered clear of judgments” about arranged marriages among Americans of Indian descent. Elsewhere, he criticizes the press for failing to deride immigrant religious practices likeexorcism and animal sacrifice as “superstition.”

More seriously, McGowan strays into exaggeration in asserting that media bias is a major cause of declining newspaper readership and network news ratings. What primarily ails networks is increasing competition with cable stations and the Internet. As for newspaper readership, it has been in decline since World War II. This drop-off has accelerated in some markets in recent years, but it has been most dramatic among groups like young single women who have no special reason to be alienated by today’s tendentious reporting. Indeed, the most reliable news consumers remain white, middle-aged males, precisely those whose opinions are most likely to conflict with mainstream media orthodoxy.

Still, Coloring the News assembles example after compelling example of bias and distortion, and this is itself an invaluable service. Although the book is somewhat long on anecdote and short on analysis, the sheer weight of its evidence leaves little doubt that in his central contention—that the “crusade for diversity has corrupted American journalism”—McGowan is dead on.