National Journal
May 9 2002

The Well-Read Wonk
Does Diversity Result In One-Sided Reporting?
by Anne Wagner

In 1993, management at USA Today adopted a diversity plan that required members of a "diversity committee" to "comb through every article appearing in the paper on a daily basis" to tally up the number of minority sources each reporter used. In 1991, New York Times editor Max Frankel said during a journalism forum "that because of political considerations he would hesitate to fire a black female reporter if she was 'less good.'" In 1993, the Los Angeles Times issued guidelines for identifying members of minorities that "many took to be a parody of a politically correct speech code." Some of the terms considered insensitive were "deaf," "Hispanic," "grandmotherly," and "middle-aged." 

Those are just three of numerous examples cited by William McGowan in "Coloring the News" as examples of diversity gone wrong.

McGowan's book is a detailed argument against "diversity" in journalism. With extensive documentation of newspaper articles—mainly from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal—he takes aim at the way journalists cover issues of race, gender, sexual orientation and immigration. No newspaper is cited here as a positive example; rather, McGowan finds faults with all of them.  Chief among McGowan's complaints is that "the press's diversity crusade has performed its greatest disservice to the country's broader civic culture by oversimplifying complicated issues and by undermining the spirit of public cooperation and trust without which no multiethnic and multiracial society can survive." He also alleges that reporters "engage in active sins of commission, reporting in a way that exaggerates the social utility of preference programs" like affirmative action, women's rights or gay rights.  At times McGowan goes a bit too far in his role as devil's advocate, such as with his seeming endorsement of a Wall Street Journal column that said the killing of Amadou Diallo by four NYPD officers "could have been seen as an honest mistake made by four men with limited information in the course of a dangerous action." Progressive readers will find a lot to argue with in McGowan's writing. That said, he does pose an interesting thesis that "intellectual or ideological diversity of news organizations has contracted" and that publishers should hire reporters who express differing points of view—"a female reporter who opposes abortion, or a born-again Christian, or for that matter, a Republican." McGowan writes that racial diversity has resulted only in an ideological monopoly in the media.

McGowan's work is well-researched but definitely one-sided, which is unfortunate because while he asks some important questions, he neglects others. Readers will have to go elsewhere to explore pro-diversity opinions or more fully examine the historically white male nature of journalism that contributed to many news organizations' push for diversity.

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