The bad news about diversity

The bad news
about diversity

Push for fairness had led to bias against truth

By Jeff Bercovici

    Diversity and bias are two words that are constantly getting thrown in the face of the media establishment, usually by people who think there's not enough of one and too much of the other. Bill McGowan believes that the two are intimately linked. That's the central argument of his new book, "Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism." McGowan, author of "Only Man Is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka," is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal. He spoke recently with Media Life about why affirmative action in the newsroom has gone too far, how the media dropped the ball on the Catholic clergy abuse scandal and why The New York Times is trying to pretend he doesn't exist.

"Diversity" is a word that we usually use with positive connotations, but in your book you argue that the efforts of media corporations to cultivate newsroom diversity have resulted in a systematic bias in their coverage. Explain.

   First of all, let me define what I mean by the diversity crusade. When I mean is the efforts to boost the numbers of minority journalists in the newsroom, the effort to enhance the sensitivity with which we report issues associated with minority communities and the effort to identify and affirm unique and distinctive minority points of view.
    There's nothing inherently wrong with diversity.
   The good news about diversity is that it has opened up the doors to a lot of talented minority journalists who might have had a hard time getting through those doors in a generation prior.
    The bad news about diversity, however, is that it has also opened up the doors to political correctness, to racial and ethnic hypersensitivity and to group favoritism, and it has done so in a way that really undercuts the candor and completeness in reporting of controversial diversity-related issues such as race, affirmative action, immigration, gay rights and feminism.

Has the mania for political correctness in our culture began to abate, or is it still cresting?

   I think it's still cresting.
     For instance, the coverage of the Catholic church sex scandal is really, truly amazing to me -- how strenuously the press is trying to avoid and resist the the homosexual angle to the story. I've documented a lot of bad reporting, a lot of journalistic malpractice in "Coloring the News," but I haven't seen anything quite as egregious as the denial and avoidance of the gay subtext to the Catholic church scandal.
   What I mean by that is news organizations have reported the scandal as a problem of pedophilia in a way that endorses calls for abandoning celibacy and for abandoning the bar on ordaining women.
     But most news organizations have, it seems, deliberately refused to acknowledge the facts showing that a vast disproportion of the priests accused of abuse have been gay, and that their victims have with rare exceptions been pubescent and teenage boys, not prepubescent children, and that the rise of the lavender clergy over the last 20 years, to the point where between 20 and 50 percent of all Catholic priests now are estimated to be gay -- that this rise really has been disastrous for the church.
     You just don't get news organizations that are willing to report it.
   New York Times reporters like Laurie Goodstein -- she's taking her cues from GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
   You read her stories and then you go hunt the GLAAD web site -- their media advisories are almost going whole cloth into Laurie Goodstein's reporting. It is a true scandal.
   There is a scandal in the church, and I very much acknowledge that. I'm somebody who is Catholic. I’ve seen three priests I've known in my life -- a former pastor and two high school teachers -- I've seen their misconduct splashed across the pages of the New York tabloids.
     So I know what I'm talking about here. Personally, I'm very saddened by the scandal, and I think that the level of coverage is very appropriate. I’m saddened by the cover-up in the church hierarchy.
   At the same time, as a news professional, as a journalist, I'm just as concerned with the cover-up that's going on in the media.
   These reporters and editors don't want to go near the story. It’s the elephant in the living room. It's a very vital dimension of the story. It's not the sole element of the story, but it's one of several, and yet it isn’t being reported in the way it should be.

You mentioned The New York Times. In your view, do the more conservative news outlets -- I'm thinking here about Fox News Channel, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, maybe the Chicago Tribune -- make the same types of systematic mistakes?

   Do they make the same systematic errors on the right?
    No.
     You have to distinguish between The Wall Street Journal's news coverage and The Wall Street Journal's editorial feature coverage.
    Does the Wall Street Journal make the same systematic mistakes as The New York Times? No.
    In terms of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, are there certain sacred cows there?
   Yeah, to some extent, but you know what? I think they're much more open-minded about their sacred cows than The New York Times is about its.
    The PC line at the Times just doesn't seem to be getting any better. Did you know that they blacked my book out?

When you say "blacked out," do you mean that they gave it no coverage whatsoever?

   They have refused to review my book. They reviewed my first book very well. They gave it almost a full-page review and named it to their notable books list. But with this book, "Coloring the News," the editor of the book review, Chip McGrath, went on the record with the San Francisco Chronicle explaining that he would not let "Coloring the News" be reviewed, he would not assign a review to it.
    He claims that there is no blackout in place and that vengeance was not a motive in his decision not to review the book. He said—can I quote him here?-- "I'm not convinced that it appeals to the kind of general audience we normally look for… I also think there's a question, and I don't know the answer: Is this newspaper . . . the best place to discuss a book that is so critical of this newspaper?"
   It's clear: they’re not reviewing it because it's too critical of them.
    The fact that he said it out loud and he said it for the record was shocking to many in the New York publishing and literary world. I think it shows a towering arrogance and it shows real hypocrisy.

One criticism that could be leveled at your book is that its argument that diversity is to blame is overly convenient for the sort of reactionary white males who have the most to lose from things like affirmative action. How do respond to this?

   The focus of my book is not who gets what jobs and what assignments. I'm really looking at the coverage.
    I really think that there's been a great deal of intellectual dishonesty within the news profession as to the adverse impact that this strenuous effort to achieve diversity has had on the coverage of important issues associated with diversity.
   This whole thing about carrying water for the white man is totally beside the point. There’s a legitimate question to be asked in whether in the diversity agenda has helped or hindered American journalism in coming to terms with really vexing national issues at a really important crossroads moment in our history, and I would answer, after doing years of research, combing through tens of thousands of news reports, both print and broadcast -- I would say that the diversity crusade has hindered American journalism at this point in terms of the coverage it has produced.

Do you think newsrooms are diverse enough now that these efforts can be curtailed?

   According to the goals set by booster organizations like the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Newspaper Association of America, they're not diverse enough.
    We haven't achieved proportional representation. But we’ve been trying for more than 20 years now, and I think that at a certain point we have to stop beating ourselves up.
    We've got to stop assuming that residual racism is the reason why we can’t boost the numbers, and really shift focus and try to recognize that the most important thing we do is to produce truthful and accurate news reporting.
    That should precede and surpass an obsession with racial percentages.

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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