Diverse Falsehoods

Political correctness in universities probably peaked in the early or mid-90s. Colleges are not, in the end, good terrain for the repression of opinions: recalcitrant conservatives and old-fashioned (i.e., free-thinking) liberals were often protected by tenure; targeted students sometimes proved feisty and litigious. State universities ran into constitutional problems when they tried to formalize restrictions on speech.

PC's sibling in the major news media has proved more durable. Coloring the News, William McGowan's compelling study of the treatment of "diversity issues" by The New York Times and several other major organs, builds a devastating case against the media's bias and often reckless irresponsibility in its treatment of some of the country's most important questions.

In McGowan's carefully researched telling, in the late 1980s, diversity mandates descended as a kind of fog on the American newsroom, suffocating many of the qualities once prized in journalism?a healthy cynicism, a desire to challenge settled truths, irreverence toward authority. In diversity's name, major newspapers have instituted everything from hiring freezes on white males, to rigid ethnically based formulas for the quoting of sources and use of photographs, to style manuals ("voodoo is a religion with many followers" and the term shouldn't be used disparagingly, says The New York Times'). Without a breath of government pressure, media barons took steps to turn their own properties into the lapdogs of a new world vision, in which cops are usually racist brutes, Latino gang members exhibit strong family values, women make wonderful soldiers and so forth down the line. Reporting that challenged these new dogmas was spiked; stories that buttressed them earned awards and promotions.

In several of the stories McGowan analyzes, it was years before the nature of the journalistic deception involved becomes clear. In 1995 The New York Times Magazine ran Nicholas Lemann's cover story about affirmative action. Its emotional core centered on a black doctor, Patrick Chavis, who had been admitted to UC Davis medical school under a preferential treatment program. Then, apparently, he devoted his skills to treating poor patients in the medically underserved inner city. The story was enormously influential, cited in the U.S. Senate, and became campaign fodder for the pro-affirmative-action side in the 1996 campaign.

But two years after Lemann's piece appeared, Dr. Chavis' license was suspended; it seemed he had opened a private liposuction practice where his poor technique led to the mauling of several patients and to one death. Investigations showed a longstanding pattern of incompetence and even cruelty toward patients, a pattern evident well before the Times touted him as an exemplar of the benefits of racial preferences. McGowan dryly notes that the Times did not inform readers of Chavis' suspension when the story first broke, nor did Lemann make a subsequent effort to correct the impression his reporting had conveyed.

McGowan has pulled together dozens of stories like this, including a nearly entirely concocted "epidemic" of black church arson, almost comically deceitful coverage of the difficulties involved in admitting large numbers of women into combat ranks and militantly one-sided coverage of such important tests of political strength as California's Propositions 187 and 209. No fair reader could help but conclude that in the 90s the press pursued a one-sided agenda in its treatment of America's most polarizing issues.

"Reasons Why"?the title of McGowans' penultimate chapter?is not, and perhaps cannot be, entirely satisfying. McGowan is correct in following his generalizations as far as they go: many leading editors and journalists came to view the movement for diversity?including uncritical backing for high rates of immigration and affirmative action?as the moral heir to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

When they embraced these causes, publishers often made their case in business terms?the newspapers had new readerships to win, and "diversity" coverage opened the way. As a source for publishing spinelessness, the impulse of appeasement, a fairly natural human inclination, ought not be underestimated. Most urban markets are saturated with self-appointed interest groups, sometimes funded by foundations, which can always get a hearing with loud charges of racism, sexism, homophobia. For publishers such groups spell trouble, more so than replaceable editors and reporters.

I would argue that some of the press' retreat from responsibility is driven by the changing culture of media ownership, as individually owned papers vanish and press lords disappear. Can one imagine the Chicago Tribune's Robert McCormick, a veteran of the trenches of World War I, agreeing to a white male hiring freeze, or his editors spiking articles that stood up for the cops in a brutality case? Today's press lords are a different lot, with a less independent sense of their obligations as owners and citizens.

Perhaps a highly fractionated society, in which increasing percentages of Americans see themselves first in terms of various hyphenated identities, actually demands a tame and politically correct mass media.