| The Weekly Standard, 11-17-2001 By Frederick R. Lynch Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, by William McGowan (Encounter, 278 pp., $ 25.95). McGowan's Coloring the News paints in grim detail how the diversity juggernaut conquered the nation's newsrooms, relentlessly documenting how quota hiring, identity politics, and self-censorship has slanted reporting on racial issues, gay and feminist topics, affirmative action, and immigration. Instead of providing balanced discussion of complex issues, reporters either avoid these topics altogether or yield to pressures for simplistic prodiversity propaganda. Leading journalists have pulled their punches on high black crime rates, ignored "gender norming" in the Pentagon's politically correct campaign to integrate women into military life, suppressed data regarding a resurgence of high-risk sexual behavior among gay men, and suppressed recognition of mushrooming problems in health, corruption, and cut-throat economic competition wrought by massive waves of immigrants. McGowan concludes that journalism's diversity crusade helped erode civic culture, while failing to deliver new minority audiences. Indeed, the effort to color the news ended up polarizing it: Alienated whites gravitated to talk radio, the Internet, and cable TV, exacerbating the trend diversity activists thought they would end. It's a sad story of the decline of journalism. |
