Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism

by William McGowan

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.

Genres: Journalism, Politics, Nonfiction, History, Business, News

262 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2001

Reviews

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in pre-9/11 2001, documents in exhaustive detail how deconstructionist race essentialism that pervades every aspect of our discourse has existed unchanged in the exact same form for over thirty years. Reading this, two things become abundantly clear: these policies don't work and their history of repeated failure upon implementation is completely ignored.

A few samples:
"Liberals were once the champions of racial transcendence; now they were fast becoming the biggest exponents of racial determinism--the belief that race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation matter above all else"

"Diversity management seminars often amount to little more than Maoist-style self-criticism sessions that create the very racial and ethnic divisiveness they are supposed to overcome"

"According to the standard media script in which whites are oppressors and blacks are victims, the latter can't be racists because, being a minority, they lack the economic and political power to institutionalize their anti-white animosity."

"But the overall picture that the average news consumer in America gets is a bleak one. Insisting on the inherent victimhood of people of color, news reporting tends to exaggerate the problem of race. The press would have us believe that racism lurks everywhere, ready to violate nonwhites at any opportunity"

"An ideological commitment to seeing the criminal justice system as institutionally racist is also evident in the resistance of the press to research contradicting that assumption."

"News organizations have become the same kind of petty dysfunctional cultures as college campuses, where transgressions against the dominant line of thought can result in ideological blackballing and ostracism. No matter how much journalistic malpractice it involves, those who toe the line earn rewards"

"Even the ideal of objectivity itself has come under increasing attack... The problem, says Tom Rosensteil of the Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, is that traditional notions of objectivity have wrongly been tarred as 'White Guy Objectivity.' In many newsrooms today, Rosensteil maintains, 'If you start talking about objectivity being the holy grail of journalism, you'd be laughed as a retrograde thinker, part of the old guard.' Many of the new minority journalists recruited under the aegis of diversity reject the thinking of their predecessors in the 1970s and 1980s who said they wanted to be journalists pure and simple, not ethnic journalists. Instead, they see themselves emphatically as "members of a community" whose job it is to celebrate and never criticize... The growing distain for objectivity results from the convergence of several intellectual fads, some with roots in the multicultural university, saturated as it is with the deconstructionist ethos. To be sure, today's journalists may not themselves have read Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault, but they have been educated in an ambiance where ideas hostile to objectivity have become the white noise of the academic endeavor, and where "race-class-gender" has become a brain-numbing intellectual mantra."

[Elvis · Rating 2 out of 5]

William Mcgowan could write all his arguments and all real world examples, in support of his arguments, in 100 pages. But he decided to fill every bit of argument with a very big amount of information which makes book too trivial. Iv got the feeling that the author pressured himself to hit page count - 200 in order to have a "solid" book, instead of enriching the readers experience with more variety of analysis or more sophisticated arguments.

[Tristan Mathias · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would say it’s absolutely essential to read this after getting out of college. Understanding the media’s PC bias might mitigate the unsubstantiated anger the youth seems to hold these days towards conservative opinions.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the most amazing read, but it included interesting information that I otherwise would have never explored.

[Zach Herman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book in college. Given the benefit of hindsight, I assume it was full of crap, but I can't remember.