Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism [Paperback]

William McGowan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2003

William McGowan opens the door to the newsrooms at "USA Today," the "New York Times," the "Washington Post" and other pillars of the "mainstream press" in this carefully researched investigation of how the quest for "diversity" has affected American journalism. Focusing on coverage of the "diversity issues" of immigration, race, gay rights, feminism and affirmative action, McGowan gives a fascinating analysis of what stories get reported and how. Along the way, he dissects the way the press "mis-told" key stories involving figures like Kara Hultgren (the Navy fighter pilot who died after missing a carrier landing), Kelly Flinn (the Air Force officer cashiered for an affair with a married man) and Patrick Chavis (the black physician who was once a poster boy for affirmative action and then had his license taken away because of medical incompetence). "Coloring the News" is an impressively documented and provocative book about how a journalism slanted by good intentions has allowed a narrow multicultural orthodoxy to restrict debate just at the point when information about America's changing national identity needs to be robust, knowledgeable and honest.

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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 262 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books; 1 edition (May 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1893554600
• ISBN-13: 978-1893554603
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 0.9 x 8.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #998,051 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 40 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Book the New York Times Doesn�t Want You to Read July 19, 2003

By Nicholas Stix

Format:Paperback

If you want to know how a Jayson Blair could have happened, this is the book for you.

Although Coloring the News was published in 2001, author William McGowan shows how Blair, far from being the fluke he has been portrayed as by the mainstream media, was inevitable. McGowan chronicles how - following the lead of New York Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. - major mainstream, daily newspapers, and TV news operations all over America, gave up on telling the truth as the goal of the news business. And he names names.

Sulzberger & Co. replaced truth with "diversity" (radicalized affirmative action aka multiculturalism aka political correctness), which involves not only hiring as reporters and editors black and Hispanic (also gay and feminist) applicants with inferior qualifications, but also imposing the multicultural/pc "script" on the reporting of events, which means that often there is no reporting at all, or only fraudulent reporting, in which certain parties are quoted and certain research cited, no matter how dishonest the former and no matter how discredited the latter is.

McGowan demonstrates how many media organizations, particularly the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, ABC News, CBS News and NPR, have botched story after story after story. He does his best work skewering the New York Times, which over the past ten years, has become a self-caricature of a great metropolitan daily. I know what a good job McGowan does on the Times, because I've covered many of the stories he discusses, and have caught the Times misrepresenting many stories he doesn't discuss.

The author argues that in seeking to be cheerleaders for certain groups, the media have hurt them, by suppressing unpleasant truths which must be faced, in order to help the groups.

Examining dozens of stories focusing on race, sex (feminism and homosexuality) and immigration, McGowan shows how in each case the mainstream media engaged in deliberate misrepresentation, ignored salient facts that contradicted their "script," or killed the story outright. For instance, he contrasts coverage of the Matthew Shepard murder with coverage of the murder of Jesse Dirkhising.

In the first month after two thugs robbed and murdered openly gay, Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard, over 3,000 stories were devoted to the case, which was exploited, in order to get hate crime legislation passed that treated the murder of gays as more of a crime than the murder of heterosexuals. Meanwhile, the murder of 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising by two gay pedophiles in Arkansas, was "killed," with only 46 stories appearing the first month after the murder. The New York Times alone ran 195 stories on the Shepard case, but NONE on Jesse Dirkhising, including during the March, 2001 trial of one of his killers (he was convicted; the other later pleaded guilty). The reason was simple: Covering the Shepard case cast gays in the role of victims; covering the Dirkhising case cast gays as the villains, which political correctness forbids.

Another group of botched big stories McGowan which dissects concern female Air Force and Navy officers who, though incompetent and/or guilty of flouting service rules, were pushed along the path to pilot, because the Pentagon had adopted illegal quotas for women pilots. As McGowan shows, any number of major media outlets (CBS News, the Times, NPR) insisted on presenting these stories, the facts be damned, as cases of heroic women battling an oppressive patriarchy.

And McGowan shows how the corruption of the Washington Post, via diversity, harmed the District of Columbia during the years-long political control of Mayor Marion Barry, a corrupt, drug-addled, megalomaniac. Instead of exposing Barry, black Post reporters and editors protected him, and harassed white reporters out of doing serious work on his corrupt administration. The black staffers engaged in openly racist harassment, "spiking stories," or causing them to die the death of a thousand cuts, through constant demands for more information.

Considering the author's restrained tone, it is a minor miracle that this book was published at all. Consider the review from Publisher's Weekly posted at the amazon.com web site, whose author called McGowan's book "inflammatory." The critic didn't come up with a single example of "inflammatory" writing, because none exists. What the writer really meant was, 'How dare he show up my politics for the soft totalitarianism that it is!'

Similarly, Library Journal reviewer Susan M. Colowick calls McGowan's evidence "impressive" and "anecdotal" in the same sentence, and attacks him for "refer[ring] to the 'outdated paradigm of white oppression' and repeatedly us[ing] the value-laden term illegitimacy for out-of-wedlock births."

In a review for Washington Monthly, McGowan's old stomping grounds, Seth Mnookin attacked McGowan for laying into a New York Times writer who had described mass murderer Roland Smith Jr./Abubunde Mulocko (who committed the December, 1995 Harlem Massacre, murdering seven people) as a man of "principle." But McGowan told the truth! (I read the Times article.)

And then there's the Times, the "Grey Lady" herself, whose brass refused to assign a writer to review Coloring the News. (When the Times' editors are pushing a book, they will run as many as three positive reviews of it by different writers on different days.)

In the mainstream media, nothing has changed. In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, where internships and jobs were thrown at an incompetent, unqualified young man by the nation's biggest media organizations (the Boston Globe, Washington Post, AND the Times) solely because of the color of his skin, mainstream reporters have been screaming from the rooftops, "Race had nothing to do with it!" and branding anyone who would state the obvious (in spite of then-Times Executive Editor Howell Raines' confession) a "hater."

As McGowan points out, the refusal of the mainstream media to honestly report the news, has fueled the explosion of the Web and talk radio as news sources. And so, Big Media can call their critics "racist!," "sexist!," and "homophobic!" all they want, or try and kill them with silence. Bill McGowan warned the media, but they ignored him. The corporate media still push agitprop in place of the news, and continue to wonder why the public increasingly deserts them.

Affirmative action corrupts, diversity corrupts absolutely.

Originally published in The Critical Critic, 6 July, 2003.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Well documented and argued August 20, 2004

By unger814

Format:Paperback

In all of my readings on bias in the media, none of been as well documented and argued as McGowan's Coloring the News. McGowan, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, believes that the media's quest for 'diversity' shapes their perspective on how to present the news and what stories to cover. Part of the argument here is that, because news organizations want to 'correct' their historically white-male centered coverage, they are willing to shape stories about minority groups however the groups see fit. This includes not running pictures of accused criminals because it may cause racial backlash (more recently, in a protest at UC Berkeley), and using a quota system to make sure that at least a certain amount of "people around town" pictures that a newspaper runs are African-American.

McGowan's title may be a bit misleading, and potentially a bit controversial, if only for the "coloring" part of the title. McGowan does not single out media coverage of African-Americans, showing that the media also shape their coverage to not offend gays, lesbians and, more recently, Arab-Americans. Instances of these include coverage of gay adoption and racial profiling.

This book is not an easy read. The paperback version is only 250-odd pages, but the text is small and there are few breaks in chapters. I was having difficulty reading it until I got towards the last 100 pages, when the stuff that McGowan documents just becomes so jaw-dropping that one can't believe it is actually true. This includes a Vermont newspaper story that got a writer fired without the normal process of disputing the charges taking place because of a small backlash from an agitator in the community. The agitator was hired by the newspaper to help shape the paper's coverage of the black community and, when an independent source verified that the original article was factually accurate, ended up with the editor's resignation. The book reads a lot like a text book and less like a partisan attack (although at times McGowan is obviously arguing that one point of view is correct, but is still able to show why the coverage, nonetheless, is skewed).

Whereas books like Bias and Spin Sisters rely upon first hand experience of the inner workings of the media, Coloring the News is all about research. Unfortunately, McGowan does not provide footnotes (he does provide notes at the end with descriptions of what he is citing), which, unless you take the time to read the notes at the end, makes it difficult to know exactly what is coming from where.

If you are a member of the media, you must read this book. If you care about media bias, read this book. If you're a casual reader, I can't recommend it to you. The only problems with this book are the textbook-like nature and the lack of inline notes.

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Eloquent and Very Well Researched! December 16, 2003

By MJN76

Format:Paperback

William McGowan's "Coloring the News" places the mainstream media under a microscope analyzing the claims that "diversity" in the newsroom will improve news coverage and inform the public to a greater degree. McGowan demonstrates that not only has news not improved, but reporters have deliberately avoided covering uncomfortable and inconvenient aspects of many stories for fear of "stereotyping" or "offending." The result is a consistently sanitized and skewed version of events. McGowan makes clear "diversity" of viewpoint is significantly more important in a newsroom that skin color or gender, yet newsrooms, in employing more minorities and systematically excluding white males, and solidified the liberal ideological grip on news coverage. Ironically, in the quest for "diversity" there has been much less presentation of different viewpoints, especially conservative or Christian views. The unintended effect of all this has been a mass fleeing from the networks to other sources of news such as radio and the internet which atleast give some validity to the conservative viewpoint.

Highly recommended.