The Press's True Colors.(Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism)

Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, by William McGowan (Encounter, 250 pp., $25.95)

Liberal delicacy has its moments. Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y., once paid the Most Reverend Prophet Alpha Omega Bondu $12,000 in state funds to drive the evil spirits from a Haitian psychiatric patient who had hacked his girlfriend to death. The Rev said the patient was afflicted by seven evil spirits, and that he had chased away four. Alert to cultural sensibilities, however, the New York Times declined to call this an exorcism; it reported that the $12,000 had been spent on "religious counseling."

As an example of journalistic malfeasance, that may not be much; by Times standards it's nothing at all. But it does hint at the problem: Whole groups and classes of supposedly oppressed people-voodoo priests among them-must be presented sympathetically in news coverage. Few in our major news organizations admit this, however, and even if they acknowledge the existence of P.C. journalism, they seem to believe it is practiced only by others. In fact, however, virtually everyone obeys the rules of the dominant P.C. culture, and makes news judgments accordingly. A dissenting judgment will be dismissed automatically as uninformed or wrongheaded, but it may also be denounced as a sign of racism, misogyny, or homophobia.

In Coloring the News, William McGowan offers a unifying theory for how this all came about: The campaign to increase newsroom diversity did it. Even if the effort was well intentioned, he says, it has had a disastrous effect on the news, especially on what might be called "diversity issues": race, gay rights, feminism, and affirmative action. It has fostered identity politics, newsroom bitterness, and a suspension of critical faculties by news organizations.

"In theory," McGowan says, "diversity is supposed to be a matter of reporters from all different ethnicities, races, genders, and sexual orientations doing their work as searchingly as possible on a wide variety of subjects, and functioning as a sort of equivalent of a representative democracy. But in practice, the regime that diversity has created does not work like this. Certain unfashionable or disfavored voices are overlooked or muted . . . and certain groups feel more empowered in the journalistic shouting match than others." Diversity measured only by skin color, gender, or sexual preference is cosmetic and superficial, and more likely to impede than stimulate the free flow of ideas.

In survey after survey, reporters and correspondents at our major news organizations overwhelmingly have identified themselves as liberal Democrats; but they insist (and seem actually to believe) that they never allow their politics to get in the way of their stories. McGowan casts serious doubt on these liberal disclaimers. He has examined the coverage of hot cultural issues, and found ...