Shades of truth.(book evaluating the influence of multiculturalism on journalism)

Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism By William McGowan Encounter Books, 278 pages, $25.95

William McGowan's Coloring the News opens with the tale of Dr. Patrick Chavis, an affirmative-action poster boy thanks to a reverent 1995 profile by Nicholas Lemann in the New York Times Magazine. Chavis was a black man admitted to University of California medical school under a state program later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court's Bakke decision. Lemann found Chavis working in a thriving ob-gyn practice in Compton. Updating the story two years later, McGowan finds that the poster boy has slid off the poster. "The Medical Board of California suspended his license to practice medicine, finding him guilty of gross negligence and incompetence in the cases of three patients--one of whom had died."

Coloring the News is the scholarly part of a recent one-two punch against the liberal media. Its moral companion is Bias, the indictment by former CBS News reporter Bernard Goldberg. [See the March issue for TAE's interview with Goldberg.] While Goldberg's book received a respectful though negative review in the New York Times, the Times is apparently struggling to figure out how to respond to Coloring the News--which hits the paper hard. Although not as juicy as Goldberg's book, McGowan's measured tone is perhaps even more convincing of the corruption of reporting in favor of "diversity."

Coloring the News does have some fun moments. One is when Times editorial writer Brent Staples bemoans the racial composition of a series of bleak photographs of drug addicts by Eugene Richards that appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine. Staples asks: "Couldn't Mr. Richards have found a setting where most or at least half the drug addicts are white?"

McGowan also gives examples of the media's attempt to sanitize radical leftist groups. He cites media coverage of the Million Man March that fails to include Nation of Islam leader Lewis Farrakhan's wacky, numerology-laced address. He notes that network news viewers are shown only innocuous person-next-door types marching in Gay Pride parades, while viewers of the uncensored C-SPAN see that the real lineup includes topless lesbians and men in leather harnesses.

McGowan devotes an entire chapter to rigorous analysis ...