NYTimes/Globe and Kennedy Cause Racial Strife

By Paul Moreno
February 2002

Diversity was the new religion, and anybody who wanted to be anybody in the news industry had to rally behind it.

The seriousness of the damage caused by the NY Times/Boston Globe and Sen. Kennedy is shown in the first five pages of William McGowan’s new book, Coloring the News.

He demonstrates that the media, especially the NY Times/Boston Globe hegemony, are engaged in a shamelessly biased campaign to promote racial preferences.

He cites the defense of affirmative action in the 1995 New York Times Magazine which deified Patrick Chavis, who had been admitted to the University of California medical school under its racial quota system (before this was outlawed by the Supreme Court).

An OB/GYN in inner-city Los Angeles, Chavis was hailed as living proof that affirmative action was good policy. He became the poster-boy in the campaign against Proposition 209, which ended racial preferences in California. Senator Ted Kennedy brought him before Congress to show that affirmative action works.

Soon after the nine-thousand-word piece by Nicholas Lemann was published, Chavis had his medical license suspended for gross malpractice. He had endangered the lives of his patients in a liposuction racket.

Lemann and the New York Times Magazine were completely silent about the story, and the Los Angeles Times covered it “in the most anguished and ambiguous terms.”

McGowan writes “Whether Chavis’ egregious professional misconduct was an indictment of the affirmative action policies that launched him in his medical career more than twenty years before, or just the tragic melt-down of an individual with personal problems, was debatable.”

He added, “But fair-minded people should be able to agree on this much: After having set him up as such a model for ‘diversity’ in university admissions, news organizations should at least have felt an obligation to report the sequel to the story.”

The media showed itself to be an arm of the homosexual-rights lobby in its coverage of the Matthew Shepard murder case. This story was used to whip up support for adding sexual orientation to federal hate-crimes statutes.

But fair-mindedness is not possible, because the media are engaged in a crusade on behalf of “diversity.”

The Diversity Crusade

The United States is becoming increasingly multicultural and needs to have an intelligent discussion about the ramifications of this fact.

The media should be helping to shape that discussion. Instead, they are ignoring or actively promoting divisive “identity politics” that are balkanizing America.

Ten years ago, McGowan discovered that, “Diversity was the new religion, and anybody who wanted to be anybody in the news industry had to rally behind it.”

Journalists are supposed to be skeptical and iconoclastic, but everyone in the industry believes in diversity. In the effort to atone for past sins of discrimination against minorities, both publishers and editors seek out and promote women and minorities in both personnel and content.

There are quotas for hiring, quotas for promotion, quotas for the number of photos of women and minorities, quotas for the number of minority sources quoted, and policing of minority “images.”

“In 1999, for example, the style manual used at the New York Times counseled that reporters and editors avoid using ‘voodoo’ as a term of disparagement, since ‘voodoo is a religion with many followers’ who might get upset by hints that it might involve ‘irrational beliefs.’”

Blacks and other minorities are the greatest victims of this media crusade to help them.

At the same time, the press tries to make the news more irrational because it believes that this will appeal to women and minorities. The publisher of the Los Angeles Times said in 1998 that he would appeal to women and minorities by providing more stories that were “more emotional, more personal, and less analytic.”

Media bias also makes it impossible to discuss issues involving the changing role of women and homosexuals in America. “Rather than offer the information to help society assign the proper place to gay and feminist perspectives in public policy, the press has tried to prescribe answers to a number of issues: AIDS, abortion, gays and women in the military, gay marriage, gay adoption. … This narrows the scope of debates that ought to be informed by many different perspectives.”

The crusade for “diversity” really results in politically correct orthodoxy. There may be a greater variety of races and sexes in our newsrooms but, on the most important issues of the day, there is rigid uniformity of opinion. “Diversity, it turns out, is only skin deep.”

Globe Embarrasses Itself

The Globe and its owner, the New York Times, are two of the worst offenders that McGowan exposes. Their diversity crusade distorts our understanding of important issues, promotes racial hatred, and often blows up in their faces. Both use internship programs to increase the numbers of reporters, and in 1996 the Globe was forced by the EEOC to stop its “minorities only” program after a student “was told by a Globe staffer that he could not even submit an application to the paper’s internship program because he was white.”

Patricia Smith had become the Globe’s first black female columnist four years earlier, and was fired when faced with charges that she had invented characters and quotations in four recent columns. Then colleagues on her former paper, the Chicago Sun Times, said that she had done the same thing as early as 1986. A Globe investigation showed another fifty-two fabrications, and editor Matt Storin admitted that he had been aware of the problem but was afraid to take action because Smith was a black woman.

That same year, white columnist Mike Barnicle was fired for plagiarizing from a book by comedian George Carlin, but then given a two-month suspension after his friends came to his defense, saying that he should not be fired for such a minor infraction.

Minority staff at the Globe protested, and Howell Raines of the New York Times charged that “a white guy with the right connections got pardoned for offenses that would have taken down a minority or female journalist.”

Barnicle was ultimately fired for an additional 1995 fabrication. Both sides felt that a racial double standard had been applied.

Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby was attacked by his editors for criticizing the attempt by Harvard homosexual activists to prevent a discussion of the nature of homosexuality in 1997, and the paper’s ombudsman called his column “offensive” and “homophobic.”

“A lot of gay activists think that any point of view different from theirs is not only wrong, but so illegitimate and beneath contempt that it doesn’t deserve to be considered.”

Homosexual-Rights Lobby

“But when homosexuals are the perpetrators of violence instead of the victims, the sense or moral urgency seems to vanish,” McGowan notes. “This is particularly true when the violence touches on the explosive issue of gay pedophilia.”

While the Shepard case produced over three thousand stories in the month after its occurrence (almost two hundred by the New York Times alone), a case involving the rape and murder of a thirteen-year-old Arkansas boy by two homosexual neighbors resulted in only forty-six stories.

Similarly, the media tried to report that corporations and municipalities had pulled back on funding for the Boy Scouts after the Scouts won their court case prohibiting an open homosexual from being a scout master.

Kate Zernike, [a Globe reporter who moved to the New York Times,] fabricated or distorted numerous cases to make this argument. The Times was “forced to run a mortifying, five-paragraph correction undercutting almost every one of Zernike’s contentions.”

“How many errors can one reporter pack into a single story?” asked one of her colleagues. “There was a time when the newspaper wouldn’t have let a reporter who displayed such talents cover a fender-bender on the Major Deegan.”

McGowan shows that there are plenty of double standards in the American media, but they are almost always biased in favor of minorities, or in favor of the media elite’s view of minority interests.

Black crime (and the crimes of black politicians like Marion Barry) are unreported or underreported, and stories that might reinforce what the media elite consider to be stereotypes of women and minorities are spiked.

At the same time, reckless and baseless accusations of white racism are exaggerated in the worst tradition of yellow journalism.

Damaging to Blacks

Blacks and other minorities are the greatest victims of this media crusade to help them.

“Are new Americans really helped by journalism that bolsters bilingual education, depriving immigrant children of the ability to speak and read English, in order to maintain traditional identities? And are immigrants, who are disproportionately victimized by alien criminals, really better off when newspapers shy away from hard-hitting reportage about crime out of deference to ‘community sensitivities’? …

“After all, blacks are usually the ones harmed by such antisocial behavior, and by the political corruption of black officials. … And what about the thousands of gay men who became infected with the AIDS virus while journalists fretted about feeding pernicious stereotypes of gay promiscuity, failing to report on the dangers of bath houses and sex clubs as aggressively as they should have?”

Ironically, the national media has not gained the minority readers that they thought they would attract by their diversity efforts, and they have lost many white males, who have turned talk radio and Fox News into big businesses.

And along the way, “Instead of making public discourse intellectually more sophisticated, the diversity ethos has helped to dumb it down.”