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Anyone over 40 remembers news reporting in the old days -- short, succinct, and in black and white. Nowadays, thanks to the agents of Adversity, the news comes in all kinds of flavors and colors: a very rainbow of hues, as Jesse Jackson might say. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? William McGowan in Coloring the News definitely thinks it's a bad thing. He begins his book with the shocking story of Patrick Chavis, one of five black students admitted to the University of California at Davis Medical School under the affirmative action program later overturned in the famous Bakke decision. This sort of story has been all too common in the past 20 years. Our major purveyors of news marched in lockstep to promote an agenda of politically-correct (PC) positions on such explosive issues as affirmative action, feminism, and gay rights. Time after time, major networks and newspapers ignored facts, slanted evidence and just made things up in order to shoehorn a story into a preconceived PC worldview. In the case of partial-birth abortion, the New York Times, 60 Minutes, and National Public Radio ran major stories spouting the feminist line that partial-birth abortion was a rare procedure used only in emergencies or where babies were deformed. Pro-life advocates were almost never seen or heard in opposition. About a year later, blatant falsifications by the abortion lobby came to light, but major news outlets took little notice. Burnings of black churches are another example. Everyone remembers the firestorm created in 1995 by the sensational stories in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today. The news-papers swallowed Afacts@ trotted out by the left-leaning Center for Democratic Renewal and rang the alarm bells on page one. The theory that racist whites were the perpetrators fit perfectly into the PC template. As McGowan details, the later evidence that the fires were not racially motivated was quietly mentioned on page 20 of the New York Times under a misleading headline. A similar pattern emerged in the case of Kara Hultgreen, who accidently parked a $30 million fighter jet in the water next to her aircraft carrier, dying in the process. The New York Times and other major news organizations parroted the line that engine failure, not rushed pilot training, was the real culprit. The Navy's reluctance to disclose the real problem was a direct result of the media's ferocious support of the feminist military agenda. No conspiracy theory is needed to explain all this. Reporters mostly go to the same colleges and pick up the same trendy ideas from left-leaning professors. Combine this educational background with the advocacy stance of many feminists, gays, lesbians, and reporters of color, and you have a recipe for the creation of a mantra-mouthing quota culture. Slogans such as Adiversity is strength@ replace critical analysis. The original plan of expanding and deepening news coverage through representation of alternative viewpoints has morphed into a regime that crushes dissenting voices. The victim is truth. The unintended consequences of the diversity strategy B talk radio, Matt Drudge, and Fox News B cannot be pleasing to the mainstream media. (Encounter Books, 2001, 249 pps., $25.95) |
As glowingly reported in the New York Times, Chavis graduated and became a wonderful doctor. As not glowingly reported in the New York Times, it later turned out that Chavis was a disaster and lost his medical license, as well as the life of one of his many hapless patients.
