Sunday, May 05, 2002

Vaara (yes, I know how incestual this is getting, but us sophomoric liberal airheads need to stick together) has an excellent post about the book Coloring the Media. I also have not read the book, but in the meta-verse we now reside that of course does not disqualify me from expressing an opinion.

I do not know why the book did not get more attention than it did. I suppose we can be thankful that it wasn’t given the Bias treatment. Perhaps it was simply the timing, or perhaps the book is as ridiculous and loathsome as it sounds.

I do have some exposure to the author, so I can comment on that. I had the misfortune of hearing him on a local NPR talk show. The host, who is fairly bright but nonconfrontational let him present his views, though a few callers did challenge him.

First of all, the guy is obviously a bully with a grudge. He was a jerk to the host who wasn’t pushing him very hard, and a complete jerk to the callers who tried to. Like many of his ilk, he considers his critics to be the racist bigots, and not him. His main thesis seemed to be simply that affirmative action in the newsroom had led to a proliferation of minorities in the newsroom and this brown mob that had infected the place refused to allow stories to be run that were critical of minority communities. Or something like that.

Of course, his premise is wrong and his conclusion is just silly. Though many of the top newspapers have increased their minority hiring, minorities are still often underrepresented. Last I checked, broadly defined non-whites made up 30% of the population nationally. Not everyone gets a picture by their by-line, but I don’t think 30% or more is too common in even the major newspapers. And, once you get below the major markets, most of the smaller dailies – from which the great mass of the country gets their news – have abominable records on minority hires.

As for his conclusion, well… There are plenty of stories that editors do not want to cover. Exhibit A: The Catholic Church sex scandals. Of course, now it is covered because eventually a certain threshold was crossed. But, it was given scant attention for years. What editor of a Boston paper would want to be the first to take that one on? Locally, the shenanigans of our Business Elite are regularly not covered at all in the Orange County Register. If not for the only recently established weekly alternative rag, it would be as if the criminal and civil trials of some of these folks didn’t happen at all. Local political and business corruption is almost completely ignored by the daily, even when there are arrests and court dates. Unless, of course, Loretta Sanchez is somehow involved.

We all know that media is not the sacred cow it pretends to be – that financial and other considerations govern what is and isn't reported, and how. But, this book puts McGowan in the same category as Ann Coulter who recently claimed that white males have no political power in this country. Even if some of his specific allegations of biased coverage are true, the notion that the subversive influence of minorities on the news can even come close to outmatching the influence of the entrenched interest groups – white males and the local political, business, and religious community– is utterly ludicrous.

If you give these people enough credit to allow that they might actually believe what they say, and aren’t simply Horowitz-style propaganda-writing whores, then this belief can only stem from a firmly installed belief that “Whiteness” is the norm, and all of its biases and transgressions are somehow unimportant, while any inroads by minorities into the media and politics is somehow less valid and deserving of more scrutiny. I’m sure minorities bring their biases and personal agendas into the newsroom no more or less than anyone involved in the media. It doesn’t mean that these things don’t deserve some scrutiny, but placing such emphasis on them folks without acknowledging the fact that, by and large, there’s much more whiting out of the media than coloring, betrays an inherent profound bigotry of white entitlement.