PC comes to the newsroom - political correctness - Special Section: The Decline of American Journalism

National Review, June 21, 1993

PROPOSITION: The mighty American media have begun moving down the politically correct road long trodden by the colleges, and are doing so for many of the same reasons. The tilt to PC in the press is a sickening phenomenon, and it needs to be distinguished from the merely maddening liberal bias often groaned about by conservatives. Indicia of this bias have been abundant for years. Polling data on reporters, editors, and anchormen have consistently shown such characters to be more liberal than the public as a whole. A carefully crafted survey done by the Center for Media and Public Policy showed that 81 per cent of high-level media folks had voted for George McGovern in 1972 (when he got only 38 per cent of the popular vote).

Content analysis of the big stories over the years also shows persistent liberal biases. One entertaining way to analyze media coverage is to seek out tendentious words and phrases in Nexis, the giant computerized database that now contains searchable articles and transcripts from two thousand publishing and broadcasting organizations. If prodded, for example, Nexis will tell you that during the 1988 presidential campaign, "Quayle" appeared within ten words of "heartbeat" in 240 news stories. In the 1984 campaign, there were only 13 articles similarly linking the H-word to Geraldine Ferraro. During the Reagan-Bush years, media thumbsuckers were regularly reporting on White House skirmishes between the "pragmatists" and the "ideologues." James Baker and later Howard Baker were typically cast as the prags, and a Nexis search of the databases during the Reagan years shows 260 articles in which "Baker" appears within ten words of "pragmatist." The word "Meese" appears in 382 articles within ten words of "ideologue" or "ideological." Thus were readers aided in figuring out who in the White House was behaving rationally.

Media liberalism doubtless provided an ideal environment for the nurturing of political correctness, but PC has in some ways transformed that environment. Now solidly based in scores of newsrooms, it still looks much like its progenitors on campus--a movement driven by truly totalitarian impulses. Its byword continues to be "diversity," a term of art now associated with several different propositions: We need a lot more affirmative action to forestall racism and sexism. We need to promote messages that tout the achievements and elevate the self-esteem of minorities, women, and gays. We need speech codes and sensitivity workshops to ensure suppression of ideas that might offend these groups. A lot of what the political-correctniks are selling just seems laughable, especially the never-ending discoveries of bias built into terms like "waitress" and "blackball." Not so laughable is the genuine pressure created by the movement to flee from the evidence when the conclusion that minorities have higher crime rates than whites, for example, or that women on average have less mathematical ability than men--is judged politically incorrect.

ONE GOOD reason for worrying about PC filtering into the media is the recent emergence of diversity as a major theme in numerous news organizations. A recent Nexis search asking for all 1992-93 articles mentioning "diversity" within thirty words of "media" or "newsroom" turned up 598 articles. One learns that the New York Times, Knight-Ridder, Hearst, Gannett, Chicago's Tribune Co., the Boston Globe, the Seattle Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others have made increased diversity of the workforce a major priority; many have established diversity committees of one kind or another in their newsrooms. The Tribune has told senior managers that their bonuses will be affected by their success in hiring and promoting minorities. New York Times advertising revenue has been in a long slide, but new boss Arthur Sulzberger Jr. says "the single most important issue this newspaper faces" is-- diversity. Sulzberger gives every indication of being a true believer: the Diversity Task Force set up last year by the Times has poked its nose into numerous corners of the enterprise, and the official ideology says that there is a News Case for Diversity: The more diverse staff will do a better job of reporting. Also a Business Case: The Times must reach out to the more multicultural markets of the next century. (The capital letters appear in the paper's own statements about diversity.) Judging from reports about the DTF appearing in the Times house organ and elsewhere, its members went through a period in which they were not talking to one another. According to the house organ's solemn yet mystifying account of these diversity travails, the big communications breakthrough came only after the task force went off on a two-day retreat in Tarrytown, New York, and its members submitted to a "test that sorted out 16 various personality and functional styles according to a framework developed by Carl Jung." Up from The Front Page.

Diversity in the media seems to mean exactly what it has always meant on campus. Definition propounded by the Times task force: "Diversity is understood to include people of every sex [huh?], race, color, ethnicity, culture, lifestyle, sexual orientation, age, experience and all other characteristics that make individuals unique." As at Harvard, the word refers to differences just about everywhere except in the realm of ideas.