Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Friday, Feb. 8, 2002

McGowan, who, like Goldberg, is not a political conservative, describes himself as "a pragmatist committed to a fair rendering of the facts . ..." And the facts he discloses in this scholarly yet lively examination show conclusively that when it comes to such issues as race, homosexuality, feminism and illegal aliens, the U.S. media cannot be counted upon to tell the truth and instead twist reality to conform with their favorite buzzword, "diversity."

"The coloring of the news is one of those stories that have been happening more or less invisibly for some years," McGowan writes. He blames Big Media's obsession with "diversity" for institutionalizing the slanting of the news, and traces the origins of this monomania to the December 1992 Diversity Summit Meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Newspaper Association of America.

He described the meeting as having "the unmistakable air of a tent revival, full of grim jeremiads, stern calls for repentance and holy roller zeal." He blames the conference for creating today's climate that justifies the deliberate distortion, or the omission, of crucial facts in stories dealing with "diversity" in all of its aspects.

For anyone interested in seeing more of the documention of media bias revealed in Goldberg's book, this book is must reading.

In the first of a three-part series, NewsMax.com reports on how American journalism attempts to manipulate the news concerning racial matters.

The Media and Race

Throughout his two terms as mayor of Washington, Marion Barry got a free ride from the Washington Post, which studiously ignored his known penchant for snorting cocaine in public and his notorious womanizing. The capital's primary newspaper, one of the most powerful business interests in the nation, continued to support him, endorsing him three times, even after he'd been publicly exposed.

In recommending Barry for re-election, the Post cited, of all things, his efforts to fight drugs, "even though the city was churning with talk of unreported instances of the mayors own drug abuse."

During that time, the Post ran "softball coverage of other troubling aspects of Barry's mayoralty, especially its corruption and ineptitude."

The Post's coverage often reeked with adulation. The paper even went so far as to suggest his arrest on drug charges was the result of white racism.

In today's newsrooms, McGowan writes, "a new mindset reigns in which racial identity and racial nationalism trump yesterday’s ideals of civic wholeness. Black cultural deficits are viewed solely as a function of white racism, while 'cultural uplift' is rejected as condescending white cultural hegemony."

Forget the Facts; Grind an Ax

A prime example of this tendency cited by McGowan was the treatment by ABC's "Nightline" of the arrest of a black Miami police officer, Maj. Aaron Campbell, by Orange County deputy sheriff Cpl. Richard Mankewich. According to Michele McQueen of "Nightline," the arrest was unjustified and an example of "racial profiling."

The incident was recorded by a patrol car's mounted videotape camera, which revealed the facts.