2. Conservative Books and "Studies" Alleging "Liberal Bias"

2.6 BOOK: "Coloring the News" by William McGowan

As usual, The Daily Howler is a good place to start when one needs to figure out how accurate books written by conservatives are. Once again, not very.

Let's start here:

On December 3, 1996, a nasty incident took place at the Marcus Garvey School in Washington, D.C. As a jury would later determine, a Washington Times reporter, Susan Ferrechio, was assaulted by Mary Anigbo, the Garvey principal. Anigbo shouted racial insults. For more detail, see yesterday’s DAILY HOWLER.

William McGowan’s book, Coloring the News, describes press coverage of the Garvey incident. The book was recently vouched for by the web’s Andrew Sullivan (see yesterday’s HOWLER). In the book, McGowan derides the Washington Post’s coverage of the Garvey event:

MCGOWAN (page 39): [T]he reaction of the Washington Post, a virtual synonym for fearless and independent reporting since Watergate days, was oddly hesitant. There was no acknowledgment of how the paper had dropped the ball by not holding the school’s mission and leadership up to closer scrutiny. Although an incident like this would certainly have gotten banner coverage had the racial roles been reversed and a black reporter assaulted by a racist white school principal, the Post initially played the Garvey story on the inside pages, making very little effort to determine what actually happened, and treating the conflicting accounts of the incident as if they were of equal weight. The paper also made frequent and conspicuous use of the term “alleged”—as in “the alleged assault”—which in context deflected Ferrechio’s credibility as a victim and as a reporter. In fact, in the first week after the confrontation at the school…the Post gave prominent space to black political activists like former NAACP president Benjamin Chavis and Nation of Islam activist Malik Shabazz who rallied to her side, blaming the white media and threatening racial violence.

That is McGowan’s nugget statement. His presentation is riddled with problems.

Let’s start with the obvious. McGowan’s complaint about the word “alleged” is, in a word, bizarre. A Washington jury would later find that Anigbo assaulted Ferrechio. But Post reporters hadn’t seen the assault, and Anigbo gave a different account of what had occurred. Was the Post supposed to mind-read the facts? In this complaint, McGowan shows the cockeyed judgment he brings to many parts of his book. For the record, the Post made it clear, in a December 6 editorial, that it found Anigbo’s story implausible. A wide range of Post op-ed writers rolled their eyes at Anigbo’s account.

Meanwhile, was the Post “initially” slow to page one? McGowan’s complaint is a bit unclear; in fact, the Post almost never ran this story on its front page, treating it as a local story in its “Metro” section. But on Day Three (December 6), the Post ran two full stories on its Metro front page, and the story never left Metro’s front after that. Since the Post had virtually no information on Day One, this was hardly a startling lag time.

Should this story have been front page? That is a matter of judgment. But it’s easy to judge McGowan’s account of the coverage of those “black political activists.” In the first week, McGowan says, the Post gave these Anigbo supporters “prominent space” as they “blam[ed] the white media and threaten[ed] racial violence.” In fact, the activist supporters were mentioned exactly once, in the Post’s report on a public meeting. Here’s how the story, by Hamil Harris, began:

HARRIS (12/7/96): (pgh 1) A number of D.C. community activists rallied around the African American principal of a city charter school yesterday and portrayed her confrontation with a white reporter this week in starkly racial terms, contending that the incident has precipitated “a series of civil rights violations.”

(2) Several activists with a history of employing racially charged rhetoric—including the Rev. Willie F. Wilson, pastor of Union Temple Baptist Church, and Malik Zulu Shabazz, head of a Nation of Islam offshoot called Unity Nation—appeared yesterday with principal Mary A.T. Anigbo at the Marcus Garvey Charter School. They defended Anigbo’s role in altercations at the school Tuesday—one with a reporter from the Washington Times and another with several D.C. police officers who accompanied the reporter back to the school.

In fact, this report was striking for the overt way it challenged the racial good faith of Anigbo’s supporters. In paragraph 3, Harris quoted a bit of Chavis’ “increasingly harsh rhetoric.” When he returned to Anigbo’s supporters, he openly humped them again:

HARRIS: (11) Chavis described the [Marcus Garvey] incident as part of national struggle. “When we try to do something for ourselves, educate ourselves, lift ourselves up, there are people who take exception to that,” Chavis said. “I hope people will not use one incident to take away the value of this educational institution.”

(12) Wilson and Shabazz on several occasions have drawn fire for statements or actions that critics called racist. Several years ago Wilson led a boycott of an Asian merchant who operated a store in predominantly black Southeast Washington, and Shabazz has appeared at several rallies during which antisemitic statements were made. Wilson’s church is large and growing, but neither Wilson nor Shabazz has drawn widespread support in recent political organizing efforts.

Should the Post have ignored this meeting? Again, the notion is simply absurd; the Washington Times covered it, too. But even in this news report, the Post was overtly critical of Anigbo’s supporters. And this report is the only example of the “prominent space” the Post gave these activists. McGowan’s account is absurdly misleading. Indeed, it borders on outright deception.

A follow-up from Bob Somerby is here:

Let’s review. William McGowan’s Coloring the News won an award from the National Press Club. Two critics called the book hokum (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/29/02). And Andrew Sullivan, in deepest Blogistan, came to an instant decision. Showing no sign of having read the book, he came down hard on McGowan’s side—and he called a few names as he did. “I thought awarding Bill McGowan a National Press Award for tackling the tough issue of ‘diversity’ in the newsroom would prompt a protest from the usual suspects,” he wrote. “Lo and behold, it has.”

Welcome to wild, tribal Blogistan! Sullivan supported McGowan’s book because the book supports his tribe; McGowan argues the “conservative” view that diversity has screwed up our newsrooms. The “suspects,” meanwhile, are from the wrong tribe; they hail from minority journalist groups, of the type which are always complaining. Therefore, they’re not only wrong, they must be called names, as per medieval tribal customs.

Except, a partial review of McGowan’s book suggests that the “suspects” may be right. As we saw yesterday, McGowan’s first case study involves the Washington Post’s coverage of the Garvey School assault incident (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/30/02). And McGowan’s treatment of that event is quite hard to square with the facts. In one of McGowan’s oddball moments, he even makes the puzzling claim that the Washington Post should stop saying “alleged” when someone says she’s been assaulted. Like Sullivan, the Post should simply decide who’s right. They should just get rid of all the fair play—and with it, our western procedures.

For the record, McGowan’s treatment declines as it goes. Who performed worst in the Post’s Garvey coverage? Hmmm. Maybe you can guess who did worst:

MCGOWAN (page 39): The most disturbing aspect of the Post’s coverage, though, was the response of the paper’s prominent black columnists. Colbert King, a member of the editorial board who writes a regular column under his own byline, dismissed the outrage of public officials who had condemned the incident and remained silent on the incendiary remarks of activists who had come to Anigbo’s defense.

He did? King wrote about the incident on December 14, 1996. “As the night must follow the day and rhythm tracks the blues,” he wrote, “what’s a racial confrontation in this town without a strong dose of racial rhetoric? And not to disappoint, by Day Four of the altercation, a posse had rallied and, with cameras rolling, they commenced to lay it on thick.” That passage was, for all who read, King’s description of Anigbo’s supporters. Nor did King bow down to Anigbo. “Meanwhile, we keep learning, through various news accounts, just enough about principal Anigbo, her staff and our precious school board’s role in approving the Marcus Garvey charter, to reinforce all of the negative stereotypes about this city,” King wrote. And did King dismiss what officials had said? He wrote, “the mayor spoke for me when he said of Anigbo et al., ‘adults have a responsibility to serve as role models…We cannot tolerate this kind of violent behavior.’” For the record, the mayor, in speaking of “Anigbo et al.,” had not been speaking about Ferrechio, the reporter who had been assaulted (as a jury later found). Indeed, almost everyone knew, from the start of the case, that Ferrechio’s account made more sense than Anigbo’s. At the Post, in fact, a “prominent black columnist,” Donna Britt, said just that, in great detail. But McGowan knew how to handle Britt; he pretended she doesn’t exist. Britt isn’t mentioned in Coloring the News, despite McGowan’s blanket take on the “disturbing” response of the paper’s black columnists. (Three such columnists wrote on the case.) He focused instead on Courtland Milloy, who wrote an angry, controversial piece saying the event was over-hyped in the press.

Sullivan’s slur on “the suspects” ignores a key fact—they just may be right on the merits. And we’ll bet you a buck that those “usual suspects” know this book better than Sullivan.

Alterman says [page 112-113]:

In his eagerness to accuse the media of attacking racism where it does not exist, McGowan took refuge in a New Yorker report by Michael Kelly that argued that the church burnings in the U.S. South in early 1996 was not racially motivated. In fact, a Columbia Journalism Review editor dissected and discredited this report of Kelly's, which McGowan ignored...Many of McGowan's sources were authors and studies who had received funding from the same network of conservative ideological "scholarship" that underwrote his own work and have also proven themselves unreliable.

Seth Mnookin also wrote a review of this book, in the Washington Monthly:

It was during this time that William McGowan, a former Washington Monthly editor and current Manhattan Institute fellow, signed on with Simon & Schuster's Free Press to write a book critiquing how a poorly conceived and executed push to diversify newsgathering organizations was robbing American journalism of its objectivity. McGowan aimed to take Shalit's critique one step further, examining not only how diversification was roiling newsrooms but how it was hurting the product of journalism as well.

It took six years for McGowan's polemic, Coloring The News, to get published, and by the time it came out, it was no longer a Free Press book. The feisty West Coast house Encounter Books had picked it up. Not surprisingly, a pungent hint of scandal surrounds this move. In late 2001, Encounter's publicist sent out an e-mail claiming that McGowan's work had been suppressed by the liberal media cabal running the country's newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses: "Originally, Simon & Schuster's Free Press had signed on to publish this book, but decided against it in fear of publishing such a controversial issue."

It sounds like a great hook: Manhattan Institute fellow has his work squelched by the very liberal theocracy he's critiquing. Unfortunately this claim, like too many of the criticisms in McGowan's outdated tome, has only the flimsiest connections to reality. McGowan did indeed sign a contract with the Free Press in 1995. By the time he got around to handing in his manuscript four years later, the editor, editor-in-chief, and publisher of the Simon & Schuster imprint had all moved on.

Still, despite Encounter's claims, McGowan acknowledges that the Free Press was willing to publish his book; it was the author who balked. "It was clear their editorial vision had changed," he told me. "If they had taken the book, they wouldn't have supported it the way I wanted them to." ("The suggestion that the book was cancelled for fear of controversy is a complete fabrication," says Mitch Horowitz, the editor who signed up McGowan. "In terms of controversy this book was a walk in the park.")

And so we are introduced to Coloring the News. As with Shalit's 1995 article, which McGowan cites approvingly several times, McGowan's book demonstrates an impressive ability to misinterpret and misreport facts. But McGowan, who seems to have begun this project with an ideological axe to grind, fails to even map the forest correctly. Coloring the News is filled with canards and an unsophisticated tendency to see conspiracies behind every door even as it fails to recognize the tremendous change that has occurred in American newsrooms over the past six years.
...
(A humorous example of how out-of-date this book is: Anna Quindlen is the most frequently cited New York Times columnist, and she hasn't worked for the paper since 1994.)

More disturbing, the examples McGowan does dust off to show double standards and reverse racism in the newsroom, such as the Boston Globe's Patricia Smith-Mike Barnacle debacle, often are missing so much information as to change their meanings. Elsewhere, McGowan's analyses are so misleading one has to wonder if the deception is purposeful. Take McGowan's treatment of the December 1995 killings at Freddy's Fashion Mart in Harlem, where a black man named Roland Smith set the Jewish-owned store on fire and then shot seven people to death.

The New York Times, claims McGowan, referred to Smith in laudatory terms. "The Times depicted Smith as a man of 'principle,' explaining that he lived 'an ardent credo' of black 'self-sufficiency' and 'resistance,' and that his actions inside Freddy's were not criminal per se, but a strange act of suicide in protest against the 'institutional force' of white racism," McGowan writes.

The article in question actually refers to Smith as mentally deranged. Furthermore, the piece never claims that the massacre wasn't criminal; instead, it simply quoted a former friend of the killer's to show how far gone he was: "'It was an act of insanity for all of us looking in on it ... But I'm 98 percent sure he didn't view it as an act of criminality, but as a strange act of suicide against an institutional force.'" The same day that story ran, the Times printed an op-ed column (by a black writer, no less) that read, "Roland Smith was driven by a sick hatred of whites and Jews and by the criminally irresponsible anti-white and anti-Semitic ravings of protesters who had been picketing Freddy's."

Even as McGowan spends thousands of words picking on the Times tendentious coverage of racial issues, he devotes exactly one sentence to last year's Pulitzer Prize-winning project, "How Race is Lived in America." He calls the 15-week series an "exception" which "managed to catch many of the subtleties and the sense of historical progress often lacking in most of the paper's daily coverage."

While McGowan will no doubt refer to negative reviews of his work as further proof that the entrenched media elite don't want to hear his views, the shame of Coloring the News is that the issues McGowan tries to raise---whether unofficial quotas for newsroom hiring results in a decrease of quality and objectivity; whether racial issues are treated with less skepticism than they should be---do need to be addressed. But as McGowan claims in his book, no serious, thoughtful analysis of these issues has been done, and that includes this work.

Inaccuracies are not the only problem with McGowan's book. In his quest to attack those who seek to improve minority representation, he also painted misleading pictures (see Sec. 4.3 more on "bias" on social/cultural issues). David Hawpe of the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote about this in this review titled "'Thumbs Down' for Coloring the News":

It's true, as he charges, that part of every Gannett manager's annual evaluation focuses on this issue. It should. You don't make progress without paying attention. McGowan treats as a damaging revelation the fact that Gannett runs an annual "All-American" review of content, looking at each of its newspapers' efforts to "mainstream" minorities. He calls this "covering the news by racial numbers," because each newspaper gets a grade.

I call it sensible. Why shouldn't we look hard at what we publish and see whether all parts of the community are represented in our choice of sources to quote, people to photograph, issues to cover? That makes good business sense, but also constitutes good journalism and should meet anybody's test of fairness.

McGowan cites examples of over-reaction to such scrutiny. For instance, he recalls an edict at one Gannett newspaper that at least one of every six faces in a photo series be a "person of color." That was over-reaction, not corporate policy. In all my 16 years as a Gannett supervisor, nobody has ever given me that kind of marching order.

McGowan quotes a columnist at that same newspaper as saying that Gannett executives insisted one out of every 10 op-ed pieces be written by a non-white. I have been responsible for the editorial and op-ed pages in Louisville, during the entire 16 years of Gannett ownership, and nobody has ever suggested, much less imposed, a quota of minority columnists.

Even McGowan concedes that "the notion of die-hard liberals standing around in the corners of newsrooms plotting to infuse news reporting with left-wing bias is a caricature." He says, "the problem is both more subtle and more insidious."

Here is the heart of his argument: that what he calls the diversity "regime" has meant "certain unfashionable or disfavored voices are overlooked or muted for a variety of reasons, and certain groups feel more empowered in journalistic shouting matches than others." He says, "the actual intellectual or ideological diversity of news organizations has contracted."

Maybe it has in some places. If so, that's not the fault of Gannett, Knight-Ridder or the other major media firms that push their properties to make progress on issues of diversity. Instead, such failures can be laid at the feet of local editors who don't explain to staffers what the policies really are, what they are intended to accomplish and how news values remain paramount in the process.

News executives who think they are pleasing corporate higher-ups with hiring, promotion and news content decisions dictated by rigid racial and ethnic quotas are not doing themselves, or their organizations, any favor. And you don't have to do it to survive. Nobody has asked me to do it. I'm still here.

Critics like McGowan minimize history. When my friend Merv Aubespin came to the art department of The Courier-Journal in 1967, you could have held a convention of all the newspaper's black professionals in a broom closet. Merv always says, "I was like a fly in a bowl of milk."

Just before civil disturbances broke out in 1968, the Courier news leadership came to the art department, asking Merv to accompany a white reporter, Bill Peterson, to the West End for coverage of a rally protesting police conduct. The situation turned ugly. Merv sent Peterson back to the newsroom for his own safety and, for the next two days, called in observations to reporters at Sixth and Broadway who wrote our stories.

After that, C-J executives recruited Merv to take special training at Columbia University and become the paper's only black reporter.

McGowan underplays the progress we've made in newsroom after newsroom across America since the Kerner Commission issued its report urging us to pay attention. The Kerner report blamed lack of diversity for the media's failure to analyze and report adequately on race problems and for its habit of writing and reporting "from the standpoint of a white man's world." That approach, the report said, was "not excusable in an institution that has the mission to inform and educate the whole of society."

Acting on such criticisms, the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1978 committed the nation's newspapers to reflecting America's racial and ethnic diversity by the year 2000. But despite all the hyperventilation and over-reaction that McGowan charges, despite all the alleged hiring and promotion "by the numbers," after 20 years the numbers still didn't look good. When it became obvious the 2000 goal wouldn't be met, ASNE simply changed its target date to 2025.

If McGowan is right about the climate in the newsroom, minorities should feel, if anything, overly empowered. But, in fact, they are leaving the business at a disproportionate rate. As a result, the proportion of non-white journalists in American newsrooms actually fell in 2001, from 11.85 percent to 11.64 percent.

I admit it. I do pay attention to those numbers. So do the people for whom I work. I think all of us in America should pay attention.