Posted on 05/29/2002 9:59:58 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
In his new book Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, William McGowan exposes in impressive and damning detail what George Orwell called "the smelly little orthodoxies" that today pervade the American news business. He argues that the dogma of political correctness has seized such a hold on American newsrooms that it distorts the way news is reported and narrowly restricts what can be assigned.
Most distorted, McGowan shows, are complex stories about racial and ethnic questions, gay rights, feminism and immigration — each of them issues in what has come to be known as "identity" politics. For years McGowan was a reporter in Sri Lanka — his first book, Only Man Is Vile, was about that deeply divided nation — where he learned the tragedy that racial and ethnic strife can bring to a country. That experience, he tells Insight, "really attuned me to the issues of racial and ethnic fragmentation" and the damage that it can do. McGowan does not want to see that happen in the United States.
A descendant of four generations of New York City policemen, McGowan doesn't regard himself as strictly conservative. He supports gun control, for example. In large part, McGowan is an old-fashioned liberal who believes in the priority of freedom of speech and the right (and responsibility) of newsmen and women to pursue the truth wherever that may lead. In Coloring the News, he shows that the news profession has bartered the pursuit of truth for a pottage of political correctness.
Insight: How did your experience with the racial and ethnic discord in Sri Lanka influence your reaction to the multicultural and diversity movements in America?
William McGowan: When I came back to the states in the 1990s, the concepts of diversity and multiculturalism were marching out of the university into the newsroom and on into the rest of the society at large. I thought these trendy new buzzwords would be greeted by at least some skepticism in the journalistic establishment. After all, they did represent a profound shift in the way we conceptualize ourselves as a nation, from the old assimilationist melting pot into the multicultural mosaic.
Personal Bio
William McGowan: As a young journalist he learned to balance a news story.
Current book: Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism.
Personal: Born, April 18, 1956; Brooklyn, N.Y. Single.
Education: Middlebury College, B.A., major in Chinese history and minor in English.
Career highlights: Editor at the Washington Monthly; Newsweek International; BBC. Has written for the New York Times, Washington Post and Columbia Journalism Review and is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal.
Previous book: Only Man Is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka.
Currently: Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Favorite authors: George Orwell, Graham Greene, Shiva Naipaul, V.S. Naipaul.
But rather than serving as a bulwark against the drift that the new concepts represented, the press became a cheerleader for them. I found it rather odd that a group of people professionally committed to skepticism and rigor would allow the clichés associated with multiculturalism and diversity to go unchallenged.
Those clichés are all around us. You hear them over and over again everywhere that diversity is being debated: "Demography is destiny" and "We need to treat people differently in order to treat them equally" and "Diversity is strength."
I soon realized that these were concepts that did not have another side. You were not allowed to question them. Here was the most far-ranging and sweeping change in American politics and cultural life — and yet you couldn't even balance a story about them! This is not journalism, it is social engineering — and that was and is dangerous.
Insight: How is the news being slanted to achieve these political goals?
WM: I noticed that a lot of news coverage was being skewed to favor diversity ideology. This new multicultural image of America affected coverage of the hot-button, diversity-related issues of race, immigration, affirmative action, gay rights and feminism. Almost any story associated with those broad issues would have such a profound slant to it that any good the diversity crusade was doing inside the media by opening up doors to minorities was, I think, more than canceled by the damage it was doing to the integrity of coverage.
The idea of free inquiry really is a dangerous idea to some. To them it seems dangerous that you actually would ask a question that might produce an answer that makes someone else uncomfortable.
Take the Catholic Church scandal. It has become verboten to write about this scandal in terms of its homosexual dimension. To talk about it is not to say that gay men in general are more likely to abuse minors than are straight men. But in the case of the Catholic clergy most of the cases involve teen-age boys, which means they are not cases of pedophilia but of molestation, sex abuse, sexual harassment — whatever you want to call it — of teen-age boys. And that, by definition, is homosexual abuse because the priests are all male.
My point is that asking this question doesn't mean you are going to besmirch all gay men. But it is irresponsible not to ask why gay priests in the Catholic Church have a higher propensity to molest teen-age boys than their straight counterparts.
Look at the evidence. We have 2,000 of these cases and 90 to 95 percent of them involve teen-age boys, not teen-age girls. So why not ask the question? Why wall it off? Why say, "We can't discuss the homosexual dimensions of it because we all know that gay men don't molest children any more than anyone else does."
I think in a lot of ways people are afraid of reality. They don't want this to be true. It's as though they're interested in the world as it ought to be, as opposed to the world as it really is, and that's very dangerous for journalists. Journalists are supposed to be dedicated to free inquiry, discovery, not to orthodoxy.
Insight: Your book underlines how different journalists are from the rest of Americans in terms of basic life experiences, outlooks and beliefs.
WM: It is remarkable how pious journalists have become! They remind you of Dr. [Samuel] Johnson writing about a man who, he said, had but one idea and that was a wrong one.
Diversity is a religion to some. If they went to church more and had real religion instead of this secular religion, I think we'd be better off.
Mainstream society tends to go to church; journalists don't. Mainstream society tends to have some kind of military service or have a law-enforcement or military officer in the family; journalists don't. Mainstream society tends to have reservations about abortion; nine out of 10 journalists favor abortion with no doubts at all.
So it is a real disconnect between mainstream Americans and U.S. journalists when it comes to how they live, think and worship. Indeed, journalists at the more elite end of the profession are very secular and don't even seem to respect those who believe.
Insight: Isn't it also true that most journalists would prefer to be called anything but a conservative?
WM: They are desperate not to be labeled conservative. To a degree, it is a mark that follows you and prevents you from advancing. Whatever myth you're busting or stereotype you're sabotaging, if it is perceived as coming from a conservative motivation it is considered invalid. Or it is considered as aiding the enemy. They say, "We don't do that kind of story because it will feed the right-wing backlash or it might encourage ugly stereotypes." The answer to that should be, "This is news. Do the story and let the philosophers worry about the consequences of telling the truth!"
Just get the information out there. That's very much a journalistic responsibility under the First Amendment. I also happen to believe there's a spiritual imperative to it as well: the obligation to see through the veils of illusion, the veils of the world not as it is but as it ought to be. We journalists should be dedicated to telling people what's out there and let them make up their minds about it. That's our professional service.
Insight: Is genuine journalistic objectivity possible? Don't our opinions manage to seep through however careful we might be?
WM: At some point objectivity may seem a little abstract, but I think there is a role for it as a goal. I think there should be journalists who gird themselves against the orthodoxies of right or left and look at the facts.
Yes, there are some problems with objectivity. It is an ideal. But I would rather live in a journalistic world that idealized objectivity, even if it failed to deliver it, than live and work in a world that spurned objectivity and celebrated a journalistic racial and ethnic subjectivity.
Look at how they teach students in law school to be able to argue one side of a case and then turn around and argue the other. That's what moot court is all about as you practice intellectual flexibility. I think the really dangerous people are those whose doctrines and dogmas are intolerant. I think there's a real function for news reporters to maintain neutrality in the face of warring perceptions and try to come up with information that's free of the taint of dogma and doctrine.
Insight: More than a few of the hoaxes passed off as true in the cause of diversity are difficult to retract once they've gone public, aren't they?
WM: Look at the story of the black-church arsons from February to July in 1996. The nation's newspapers and broadcast organizations were gripped by the story line that black churches were being burned in the South at the hands of a conspiracy of racist whites. The stories seemed to be confirming that the country had not come very far from the "Mississippi Burning" of 1963.
The story turned out to be a crock. Even President [Bill] Clinton aided and abetted it. An assistant U.S. attorney for civil rights turned his incendiary rhetoric on the story. All the racial activists in the country leapt on it.
When people started looking at the facts rather than the rhetoric they discovered that this conspiracy did not exist. They discovered that even the pattern of church burnings wasn't sufficient to merit any kind of conclusion that we were returning to an outbreak of white racism [see "Burned Out and Washed Up," Sept. 2, 1996]. When a lot of the incidents turned out to be vandalism and accidents, corrective journalism never got the prominence that was given to the original "Mississippi Burning" story line.
Insight: In Coloring the News, you are very harsh on the New York Times as a leader of the diversity crusade.
WM: I didn't set out to attack the Times, I went where the facts led me. Look at the racial hoaxes they've aided and abetted in their reporting: the black-church burnings in the South, the painting of swastikas on the door of a black Green Beret at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the so-called "good-old-boys" reunion of the agents of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division of the Treasury Department. All of these turned out to be "cry-wolf" stories.
It is amazing how much steam such stories get and how fast they get it when the story favors some line being cast by racial activists determined to blame social ills on white racism.
Insight: So deep down, there is a hate-America agenda at work in the diversity crusade?
WM: There is a hate-America or a blame-America syndrome, and it appears to result from several sources. First, it comes out of the left, particularly the Vietnam and post-Vietnam left. Second, it comes out of the cultural myopia of people who haven't lived in other parts of the world. There is this feigned sophistication and feigned cosmopolitanism. But my experience suggests that it actually springs from a deeply provincial and culturally inexperienced and naïve view of the world.
If these people had traveled around a bit, if they had seen and lived in parts of the world that are truly bad, where racism is deeply rampant and where civil rights and liberties are nonexistent, they might shed some of their naïveté. It is very difficult to listen to the typical lefty whine and carp about America when you've been to other parts of the world and know the truth.
Insight: In your book, you lambaste contemporary journalists for "their fatuous self-regard and absence of self-criticism." Those are well-chosen words indeed, and seem pretty well to sum up the problem.
WM: Yes, the absence of self-criticism is distressing. These people do not want to ask uncomfortable questions about their own agenda, about the way they are doing things, about what they've done to journalism. Coverage is marked today by racial and ethnic hypersensitivity, group favoritism, double standards, cultural relativism. Everything is filtered through a narrow orthodoxy. But serious questions are not asked about any of these problems.
Insight: The issue runs deep, doesn't it? Diversity has become so much a part of our culture in general that it is going to be difficult to create a higher standard of journalism. What can be done to help news organizations see themselves as having become unbalanced?
WM: Maybe books like mine and Bernie Goldberg's Bias [about the left-wing bias at CBS News and of anchorman Dan Rather] will do some good. I think perhaps with enough embarrassment people will come to say, maybe we should switch priorities here.
There are two ways of attacking. The first way is the quick and dirty way where you write an essay that is essentially a screed, an indictment. Then there's the other way and it takes a number of years. You sift through more than 10,000 news reports and news stories and put together a critique that's more than an indictment. It is evidence.
That's what I've tried to do in Coloring the News. And if you're open to the argument, if you have an open mind, then I think it's pretty convincing. But is it going to make any believers? I don't know.
A lot of news organizations now are controlled by corporations where managers and executives are rated on how much they support diversity. You are not promoting diversity if your news organization is publishing material that challenges it in any way. And you must not be perceived as challenging diversity in the least. So it makes it difficult to reverse the course.
Every year the American Society of Newspaper Editors has its annual convention and releases its annual report on diversity in journalism. And every year the numbers pretty much stay the same. They're not making very much progress, and that's because there aren't enough minority college graduates going into journalism.
News organizations have responded to the charges of political bias by decorating their newspapers with conservative columnists or polemicists or op-ed people. But the real problem is with the newsroom reporting staff. Those staffs don't have enough people who are able at the very least to identify and articulate what the conservative view of something should be in order to balance news reporting that has for too long been overdetermined by liberal perspectives. They should be committed to skepticism and rigor but they are not.
Stephen Goode is a senior writer for Insight magazine.
email the author
This one statement is worth a hundred times all the PC stuff that aspiring jouralists learn by going to 'journalism' school.
"WM: There is a hate-America or a blame-America syndrome, and it appears to result from several sources. First, it comes out of the left, particularly the Vietnam and post-Vietnam left.
The Left in the press was the cause of the Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson knew he was going to send troops (Marines) to Vietnam AFTER the election of '64. At the same time Cronkite, Chancellor, and the rest of the media never pressed Johnson about his plans for Vietnam.
Meanwhile the press excoriated Barry Goldwater as a "War Monger", and were accomplices in one of the most cynical uses of TV news media manipulation in electoral history, the Bill Moyers "Daisy" commercial.
Ladies and gentleman of Free Republic, there is no "New Left", "New Politics", "Third Way", or a "New World Order". The Red Diaper babies, their children and grandchildren are still in control of the presses, transmitters and the corruption of the 1st. Amendment.
Time for a little spite? It really started in the Garden.
Not if the Gay Lobby wants to do the same thing in the Boy Scouts!
AHmen.
I particularly like his take on "news" reporting:
the real problem is with the newsroom reporting staff. Those staffs don't have enough people who are able at the very least to identify and articulate what the conservative view of something should be in order to balance news reporting that has for too long been overdetermined by liberal perspectives.
This describes the problem in a nutshell; what should be "news reporting" has become diversity-sensitive propaganda. Today's "reporters" are not even aware there is another point of view to any story.
A way to 'undo' the damage, with effort.
Without the same Father, we have NO rules of engagement, and 'evil' can be called 'good' by ALL parties.
Sorry, couldn't get past this bit of idiocy in the article.
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