IP: All the News That Fits; How the media color their coverage.

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 22:13:12 -0800
> To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
> From: Einar Stefferud <stef () nma com>
>
> WSJ.com Opinion Journal - Wednesday, December 12, 2001 12:01 a.m.
>
> OUTSIDE THE BOX
>
> All the News That Fits   -   BY PETE DU PONT
>
>      How the media color their coverage.
>
> What you are about to read will disturb you. It should, because it is
> additional evidence that the information which Americans use to form
> conclusions is being slanted and sometimes distorted to meet the
> requirements of political correctness.
>
> Suppose you are the managing editor of a leading newspaper with regional or
> national coverage. Would you:
>
> * Delete from your news story the race of a rape and sodomy suspect who was
> still at large, so as not to encourage stereotyping in the minds of your
> readers?
>
> * Approve the continued use of inaccurate data regarding partial-birth
> abortions after it had been shown to be false?
>
> * Use the news stories in your paper to advocate the defeat of a ballot
> proposition you disagree with, and tell your staff that "the real job of the
> paper is to defeat this thing?"
>
> * Order that photos of five black police officers arrested for narcotics
> trafficking not be published because it would be devastating to the
> "commanding need" for black role models in your community?
>
> * Require that reporters meet specific numerical goals for the number of
> women and minorities quoted in stories and used as sources, and pay your
> editors in part based on meeting these quotas?
>
> Or would you agree with the seemingly quaint, politically incorrect view
> expressed in the current issue of Playboy that "reporters are bound by the
> truth. Journalists aren't supposed to push [an issue]. They must present all
> sides."
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
> In his new book "Coloring the News," William McGowan details these (and a
> great many more) actual examples of "diversity" in action in the American
> news media, which he says are the consequences of the press' incessant
> support of the "transmogrification of liberalism from a race-neutral to a
> race-central philosophy."
>
> The book is a disturbing account of how in the name of diversity the purpose
> of reporting events has changed from informing readers of the facts to
> advancing the newspapers' chosen causes and attempting to alter the readers
> perception of reality.
>
> Two examples illustrate the point. The horrific murder of Matthew Shepard, a
> homosexual, by two thugs who lured him out of a bar and into the Wyoming
> snow, severely beat and left him tied to a fence to die was quite properly a
> major news story. A search of news stories about the killing the month after
> turned up 3,007; the New York Times alone ran 195 stories on the case. A
> year later a male Arkansas teenager was drugged, repeatedly raped over the
> course of hours and then suffocated by two gay neighbors. In the month after
> this murder only 46 stories were written, none by the New York Times, nor
> was there any coverage on the four major television networks of the case or
> the subsequent trial and conviction.
>
> So strong is the national media's internal bias in favor of homosexual
> rights that collectively it cannot bring itself to report that there is
> horrific violence on both sides of the divide. To editorialize in favor of
> homosexual rights is any papers right; to selectively avoid reporting
> serious crimes that contradict the papers agenda is a policy that ill serves
> society.
>
> The second example provides a panoply of media thinking about race, and
> makes Mr. McGowan's point that "well-intentioned efforts to make news
> organizations more sensitive and inclusive can also make them forbidding
> places to discuss the . . . morally complex aspects of ethnicity, race, and
> gender."
>
> In a 1993 public forum on racism in Burlington, Vermont, a young white woman
> attempting to speak was cut off by a black moderator, saying that the forum
> had been designed for "people of color." A local reporter's next-day story
> on the incident brought angry charges from the moderator (an aid to the
> Mayor of Burlington) that the story had "inflamed racial tensions"; he
> threatened a minority protest march on the paper and a demand that the
> reporter be fired immediately. The Burlington Free Press' editor fired him
> that evening, in a two-minute meeting without a hearing.
>
> The subsequent trial (and out of court settlement in the reporter's favor)
> was a nightmare for the Free Press and Gannett, its owner. A videotape of
> the forum showed it to be militantly anti-white in its rhetoric--the
> reporter in fact had gone easy in his story. The Free Press turned out to
> have all kinds of diversity quotas: "at least one column in four should be
> about a minority or address a diversity issue"; one op-ed in ten must be by
> a non-white; one of six faces in a regular photo series must be a person of
> color. And embarrassing quotes were discovered in which the forum moderator
> stated that all European-Americans were racists.
>
> So the media's devotion to political correctness dramatically set back the
> cause of racial understanding in a city in which it had been pretty good to
> start with.
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
> Mr. McGowan's concludes that all this focus on diversity has filled
> newsrooms with activists for various racial, gender and sexuality causes,
> leading to self-censorship of information that might contradict politically
> correct viewpoints. That has led to public distrust of the print and
> television media.
>
> "An ideological press whose reporting and analysis is distorted by double
> standards, intellectual dishonesty and fashionable cant favoring certain
> groups over others only poisons the national well," Mr. McGowan writes.
> Instead of raising the quality and tone of public discussion of issues, "the
> diversity ethos has dumbed it down, blunting the public's faculties for
> reasoned argument just when the edge has never had to be sharper."
>
> Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is policy chairman of the
> Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears
> Wednesdays.
>
> Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
> http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?id=95001586

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