June 1, 2002

Shades of truth
Book evaluating the influence of multiculturalism on journalism
by Clay Waters

William McGowan's Coloring the News opens with the tale of Dr. Patrick Chavis, an affirmative-action poster boy thanks to a reverent 1995 profile by Nicholas Lemann in the New York Times Magazine. Chavis was a black man admitted to University of California medical school under a state program later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court's Bakke decision. Lemann found Chavis working in a thriving ob-gyn practice in Compton. Updating the story two years later, McGowan finds that the poster boy has slid off the poster. "The Medical Board of California suspended his license to practice medicine, finding him guilty of gross negligence and incompetence in the cases of three patients--one of whom had died." Coloring the News is the scholarly part of a recent one-two punch against the liberal media. Its moral companion is Bias, the indictment by former CBS News reporter Bernard Goldberg. [See the March issue for TAE's interview with Goldberg.] While Goldberg's book received a respectful though negative review in the New York Times, the Times is apparently struggling to figure out how to respond to Coloring the News--which hits the paper hard. Although not as juicy as Goldberg's book, McGowan's measured tone is perhaps even more convincing of the corruption of reporting in favor of "diversity."

Coloring the News does have some fun moments. One is when Times editorial writer Brent Staples bemoans the racial composition of a series of bleak photographs of drug addicts by Eugene Richards that appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine. Staples asks: "Couldn't Mr. Richards have found a setting where most or at least half the drug addicts are white?"

McGowan also gives examples of the media's attempt to sanitize radical leftist groups. He cites media coverage of the Million Man March that fails to include Nation of Islam leader Lewis Farrakhan's wacky, numerology-laced address. He notes that network news viewers are shown only innocuous person-next-door types marching in Gay Pride parades, while viewers of the uncensored C-SPAN see that the real lineup includes topless lesbians and men in leather harnesses.

McGowan devotes an entire chapter to rigorous analysis of media reporting on immigration. He predicts that September 11 will force the press into catch-up coverage of the downside of mass illegal immigration. McGowan also wades fearlessly into issues of race, ethnicity, and crime, and uncovers cowardly reporters who will speak frankly only off the record or not at all. Journalists come off as careerist toadies, enthralled by what columnist Art Carey of the Philadelphia Inquirer terms "phony diversity, a cosmetic, Benetton advertisement vision of diversity, not a genuine diversity of intellects and ideas."

Coloring the News includes the first reporting I've seen between book covers on the Jesse Dirkhising murder. Dirkhising was the 13-year-old Arkansas boy sexually tortured and murdered by two homosexual men. The crime received very little press coverage--unlike the murder of the young homosexual Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. On a Nexis search, writer Andrew Sullivan found 3,007 reports of the Shepard killing; 46 for Dirkhising.

McGowan thinks that liberal media bias may actually harm liberal causes, partly because it gives liberals a false sense of confidence. The public outcry against President Clinton's gays-in-the-military proposal caught the new administration by surprise because the media, sensing nothing controversial, kept it out of view until Clinton made it policy. Meanwhile, the Internet, talk radio, and cable news have become countervailing conservative influences, reducing the clout of the mainstream press.

One quibble with the book is its occasional conflation of reporters and columnists. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert is, after all, paid to spout humorless liberal opinions. News reporters are supposed to be objective.

Still, this is a necessary book for anyone who knows the media is biased and wants to have specific examples at his fingertips. Every few pages of Coloring the News recount some forgotten cultural skirmish capable of enraging conservatives all over again, from the lunatic feminism that tinted the coverage of military pilots Kara Hultgreen and Carey Lohrenz to the cowardice that muddied reporting of the black attacks on Jews in Crown Heights. McGowan doesn't offer a way out, but his book is a galling, frustrating call to action.

Jersey City, N.J. resident Clay Waters was an editor for Bridge News Service.

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