'COLORING' OUTSIDE THE LINES: I finally found a negative review of William McGowan's "Coloring the News." It showed up in the "Washington Monthly," which is now bi-monthly, which may explain why it's taken so long to surface.
The review, by Seth Mnoonkin, a former senior correspondent for inside.com and Brill's Content, is pretty weak. He spends half the article describing the inside baseball of how the book came to be published and obsessing on a discredited "New Republic" article on diversity at the "Washington Post" (read a discussion of that here) before getting to the real criticism. "McGowan's book demonstrates an impressive ability to misinterpret and misreport facts," Mnoonkin writes, while citing but a single instance where it does so. But this is a review that raises many questions that go unanswered, such as this one:
"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." What "tremendous change" is this guy talking about? As a real, live journalist in a real, live newsroom, I can guarantee you that very little has changed on the diversity front, and economically, virtually nothing has changed. I've seen jobs go unfilled for months while papers boosted their profits.
About that economic angle. Mnoonkin thinks this book should have been written in the mid-1990s, back when job-scared Angry White Males were marching on the castle with pitchforks in hand: "Efforts to diversify the country's newsrooms were often forced and clumsy, and many people, black and white, had legitimate gripes. There was a growing backlash against affirmative action." But then, apparently, things magically improved. People immediately quit bitching about questionable hiring practices, because there were jobs a-plenty (though not anywhere I've worked). "Affirmative action in the newsroom ... became less pressing as the economy got better and there were more jobs to be had. And the country's news directors, editors, and publishers have become more nuanced in their efforts to broaden the makeup of their operations." First of all, the economy is most decidedly not getting better, especially in newsrooms. Thousands have been laid off in the past few months. Second, the problem with affirmative-action practices at big news companies is that they aren't just the "cast a wider net" kind; they almost always link news executives' salaries, bonuses and promotions to quotas, though they're more likely to be called "goals."
That's the problem with this review. It focuses too much on affirmative-action issues, and ignores what McGowan was really talking about: the unquestioned assumptions that surround coverage of racial issues and "diversity."
