Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism [Hardcover]

William McGowan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 25, 2001

Reveals how good intentions have constricted journalism within a narrow multicultural orthodoxy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a book likely to spark controversy, and with the relentlessness of a prosecutor, McGowan (Only Man Is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka), a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, presents case after case in which, he contends, reporters and editors got stories wrong or ignored topics worthy of coverage because of their liberal ideologies and their fear of offending African-Americans, gays or feminists. (In many cases, he says, the journalists later admitted their own timidity.) Both in hiring practices and story coverage, multicultural journalism is "oversimplifying complicated issues" and "undermining the spirit of public cooperation and trust," McGowan writes. On race, he points to what he calls "soft" coverage of Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry and Rev. Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March. But some of his arguments are inflammatory. Lumping "Gay and Feminist Issues" together in one chapter, he compares the coverage of the Matthew Shepard murder and that of another murder by two gay pedophiles in light of what he calls "the sanctity of the gays-as-victims script." McGowan also cites biases in reporting on the abortion issue, attributing them to the fact that over 80% of journalists surveyed say they are pro-choice. Detractors will note that journalists rarely cover issues without biases, and that it's unlikely that journalists of the past covered most causes including the 1960s struggle for civil rights that McGowan holds up as a model for race relations in the United States with the objectivity he trumpets. Skeptics of multiculturalism will love this book, and lefties will love to hate it. (Nov. 15)Forecast: Encounter Books knows how to reach its conservative audience. More generally, this will generate controversy among media mavens.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

McGowan, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contends that the drive for diversity in the newsroom has resulted in shoddy journalism. He has compiled an impressive array of anecdotal evidence, but his litany of journalistic negligence includes such questionable examples as the promotion of safe sex for everyone (not just gay males) and use of the term anti-abortion instead of pro-life. Claiming that news outlets are so out of touch with mainstream thought as to have alienated most people (he blames pro-diversity reporting for the rise of talk radio), McGowan betrays his own ideology when he refers to the "outdated paradigm of white oppression" and repeatedly uses the value-laden term illegitimacy for out-of-wedlock births. News reporting has always reflected the opinions of those who produce it; a more illuminating study would have delved deeper into the reasons for the predominance of liberal views. Still, the points raised about the dangers of ethnic and cultural cheerleading in the newsroom make this an important book for journalism collections. Susan M. Colowick, North Olympic Lib. Syst., Port Angeles, WA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 262 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books; 1 edition (December 25, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1893554287
• ISBN-13: 978-1893554283
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,024,051 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perverted Diversity, January 8, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism (Hardcover)

Both Bernard Goldberg and William McGowan have written books about the obvious bias in newsrooms today. Goldberg's book, Bias, was written with specific reference to his many years at CBS news. McGowan has written a more generalized and philosophical book about how publishers, managers and editors made conscious decisions to "diversify" their newsrooms in an effort to present a more complete and balanced view of the world in which we live.

McGowan believes that effort became corrupted early on. Instead of presenting a useful, broadened view of our complex lives, the news today has become much more narrowed. Political correctness reigns, with journalists who are now advocates rather than reporters. Different points of view, once cherished, are now discouraged or attacked outright within the newsrooms themselves. Not that alternate views are never published or aired. But to do so requires the journalist to undergo heavy criticism, intimidation, and in some cases, complete ostracism. For journalists who might report different views, McGowan writes that many have found those stories not worth the effort. Something of that sort seems to have happened to Goldberg.

In the end, today's news has nothing to do with intellectual curiosity tracking through a wide range of opinions; that is, real diversity. It is only about promoting preferred groups and skin color.

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Even better than I anticipated it would be, September 10, 2002

By 

J Lee Harshbarger (Ypsilanti, MI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism (Hardcover)

Back in the days of the Soviet era, the West made snide remarks about news coverage in the Soviet Union, how only news that made Communism look good was printed, and anything that would make it look bad ignored; how facts were ingeniously twisted to make a sorry situation look like a Communist triumph, how only the bad things about capitalism were printed. The West patted itself on the back for its investigative journalism, its freedom to pursue and print the truth, unhindered by authoritarian forces.

Yet today in the USA, we now have the same type of situation as the Communist regime. Here, there is no government doing such extreme filtering of the news, though; the news media are doing it themselves. These unelected bastions of power control the public agenda and use their unchallenged power to force their ideological crusades onto unsuspecting news consumers. Now they are the ones deserving of the snide remarks.

I have long been agitated by the liberal bias of the mainstream news. I enjoy reading left-wing magazines like Mother Jones, In These Times, The Nation, etc., to get an understanding of the views of the left. These are not irritating because they wear their bias on their sleeve. What is irritating is how the mainstream media, who try to parade themselves as being neutral, are anything but. It's easy to pick up in things like little phrases they use. One example I'll never forget was a comment in passing by Dan Rather on CBS News, something about "a woman's constitutional right to an abortion." Whoa! And where in the constitution is that? And how about coverage on the evolution issue. Remember the Kansas debacle? All they did was to remove the required testing of macroevolution (one species turning into another), without removing the required teaching of microevolution (adaptational change within species). Yet to hear the media scream about it, you'd think they'd decided to teach the book of Genesis in schools and ditch evolutionary theory.

Yes, I am familiar with plenty of bias in the news media, but this book gave me far more examples, most of which I had not read about, and dug at a deeper level. It was incredible to see how far journalists are going to preserve their cherished ideologies. It's every bit as dishonest as the Soviet propaganda machine was. If anything does not fit with the Politically Correct Script, it is either ignored or twisted so far as to give a picture opposite of the facts.

Like other reviewers here stated, this book was quite upsetting to read. Yet that didn't make me not want to read it; it was too good. Most of the book is example after example of how prominent social issues have been reported in a fashion that originates from a narrow view of the way the world should be, as well as examples of the cruel treatment given to those journalists who dared to report something outside of the Script.

Until I got to the last two chapters of this book, I would have rated it a 4 (see About Me for details on my grading system), but the last two chapters upped it to a 5. Up until then, the stories were fascinating, but were only reports of the sorry state of American journalism. The last two chapters offered some analysis, and it was so striking that it was like twisting the dagger after the stabbing. In these last two chapters, I found myself writing comments in the margins, McGowan's analysis was so good. He showed how the media's rejection of anything outside of their ideological goals in order to help their agenda is instead hurting it. They have shied away from some types of reports to avoid conservative backlash, but they're getting it anyway because it has become too obvious that they are not reporting, but rather crusading.

And that's something else striking in these final two chapters: how some journalists have actually admitted that they are not interested in objective reporting, but in championing causes. Some even scorn the ideal of objective reporting as a white cultural imperialist idea! Others take the multiculturalist/relativist idea to the hilt and claim there are no such things as facts, only different "stories." These are the kinds of things that really send this book over into 5-star territory--the actual admissions by journalists regarding their view of the news, newspaper editors crying out that their paper is going to stop a certain referendum in an election, of reporters admitting they are afraid to write some things they have discovered for fear of ostracism and loss of career possibilities...

This book shows that it's even worse than I thought. Knowing that journalists' own worldviews are far more liberal than Americans as a whole, it's understandable that their views are going to come out in their reporting. But to learn of the many blatant attempts to aggressively filter the news so that their causes never get bad coverage, to learn of the McCarthyism present in newsrooms, and to learn of their own admission that "the news" is no longer about facts, it shows that American journalism has truly lost its way.

I used to think of the New York Times as a classy newspaper. I have now finished three books that deal with news reporting (My Country Vs. Me, It Ain't Necessarily So, and this one), and in all three books, there is example after example of the shoddy journalism of the New York Times. In "It Ain't Necessarily So," sometimes the New York Times comes out on the side of accuracy, but even in that book, the inaccuracies far outweigh the accuracies. The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post are two other newspapers rife with dogmatic adherence to the Script.

My policy has long been to read from magazines on both the clear Left and the clear Right. I have found this to be a better way to discern what's really going on than reading mainstream media. This book shows how much they cannot be trusted.

51 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Courageous Exposure, December 7, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism (Hardcover)

McGowan exposes in great detail about what many of know: the media, in its conscious decision to add minorities to its staff at any cost, has destroyed journalistic impartiality on many important issues. McGowan's major point is that as this country moves headlong into major demographic changes, without any input from its citizens, the media has been complicit or silent about this historical change. Most of this is due to the fear and intimidation of non-minority journalists coupled with the addition of minority journalists who are cheerleaders and advocates for these changes. McGowan is particularly strong on the subject of immigration, where he describes the nearly universal lack of discussion on this critical subject. In light of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, the failure of the media to discuss this subject has had tragic consequences. A must read for those concerned about the future of journalism and the future of the United States.