Racism Gets No Extra Credit for Pursuing Political Correctness

This is at least the 253rd time the terms politically correct or political correctness have appeared in the Los Angeles Times since last November.

Who’s counting?

EXTRA!, the publication of media watchdog group FAIR--Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

Why is EXTRA! counting?

Because FAIR embraces a mind-set that tends to misunderstand the term, and thus to discount the extraordinary outpouring of public impatience for the sort of ideology-driven, intellectual dishonesty most people associate with PC.

And the single most politically incorrect faux pas of the moment is the use of the term PC itself.

So. What does PC have to do with racism, the subject of the July/August issue of EXTRA!?

Not a thing, if you think about it.

Racism is probably the most hideous cancer ever to scar this nation. And anyone who doubts that it’s still a potent force is either spectacularly unobservant or a politically correct right winger.

By and large, EXTRA!’s 18 articles plus sidebars do a good job of pointing out where news media biases lie.

Fact is, the major media are largely white-owned and reflect a mainstream--mainly white--viewpoint that can, in itself, produce racist results.

Barbara Reynolds, an editor with USA Today, says “at least 95%” of media news decisions are made by white males. And, she contends, “the vast majority” of editorial writers and news managers live in the suburbs and have stopped caring about city problems.

Domestic problems in general get short shrift, she believes: “While it is understandable that the Bush agenda tilts heavily toward foreign policy rather than domestic concerns, it is perplexing why the press meekly follows that agenda.”

Many EXTRA! articles focus on media treatment of African-Americans. But the reported biases don’t stop there.

Howard Jordan, for instance, notes the inexcusable fact that the 22 million Latinos in America are “practically invisible” in the media--both as newsmakers and as reporters.

Jack Shaheen’s essay on “The Arab Stereotype” is a powerful critique of how Arabs are routinely villainized. And every writer and editor in the nation should take to heart Jon Funabiki’s argument that it’s long past time to lay off the invasion metaphors in discussing Japan’s business practices in the United States.

Whether inspired by ignorance or malice, each are instances of racism. And because the media shapes public perception, it is extremely important that such bias be pointed out.

But FAIR isn’t always on target. That’s where political correctness comes in.

For instance, in an essay titled “Can We Talk About Race?” Kirk A. Johnson tells the story of a white store clerk who asks a black child if she is “enjoying looking at the monkey in the mirror?”

Johnson confronts the clerk, who says the remark was totally innocent. But Johnson will have none of that.

Anyone with a shred of social or historical sophistication knows that such a remark echoes the ugliest sorts of racism.

But face it: There are some stunningly unsophisticated retail clerks around these days. And anyone who hasn’t noticed that small children--white kids, Asian kids, Latino, black and Arab kids--bear a strong resemblance to orangutans is either blind or politically correct to the extreme.

Other writers in the EXTRA! package decry--with great justification until recently--the media’s reluctance to discuss the problems that plague inner cities, including poor health care, employment discrimination, police brutality, the drug epidemic and street crime.

But let PBS television station WGBH air a “Frontline” documentary on drug crime in Boston’s black neighborhoods, and FAIR’s Johnson goes ballistic.

“It took a 3,000 word position paper, appeals to the WGBH community advisory board, and 22 weeks of persistent pressure from the community coalition before Frontline producer David Fanning finally admitted that the documentary perpetuated racism,” Johnson writes triumphantly.

But many journalists may wonder if the producer didn’t recant because the coalition’s re-education campaign simply wore him down. That’s the classic can’t-win situation FAIR puts people in too often: If FAIR says they’re racist, and they don’t capitulate and admit their racism, then, man oh man, they’re really racist.

In addressing racism in the media, FAIR provides an important public service. But FAIR needs to watch itself, to make sure its own self-appointed activists don’t take off on the sort of harebrained PC witch hunts that trivialize the issue of racism and warp truth in the fun-house mirror of ideology.

REQUIRED READING

The cover alone of the August Smithsonian is worth the price of the magazine. That’s one bizarre-looking fish staring you down.

SHREDDER FODDER

* It doesn’t take Freud to figure out that the American Spectator gets nervous around strong women. From the cover title--”Boy Clinton’s Big Momma”--to the inside headline--”The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock”--the magazine squirms uneasily.

The subtext of this hatchet job is that Hillary Clinton is a lunatic leftist radical feminist shrew hiding behind a First Lady smile until she gets her big chance to emasculate America.

Evidence? Well, she gave a rather squishy commencement speech when she graduated from Wellesley in 1969, Daniel Wattenberg writes. And some people in the campaign don’t like her. And she supports lots of liberal causes. . . .

Wattenberg’s quotations from Hillary Clinton’s legal writings suggest that he may have a point in saying that “Hillary suffers from a massive misunderstanding of the function of parents.”

Or that she “doesn’t appear to grasp how spontaneously evolved social institutions like the family absorb and retain knowledge and wisdom through the ages.”

But then he takes a wild leap. Hillary Clinton isn’t really interested in the welfare of children at all, he says.

Rather, if children are deemed responsible at a younger age, as she proposes, “then career-first moms (and dads, for that matter) need not have their busy days bustling from law offices to corporate board rooms to television studios troubled by occasional pangs of conscience for their neglected children.”

* Finally, you figure, a story a dude can really use!

But thumb through the new Dirt magazine to the cover story: “How to Win a Fistfight.”

How bogus! Instead of a blow-by-blow, how-to story, the magazine (Sassy-for-boys, it might be called) tells how to avoid a fight.

The “verbal judo” advice is pretty cool.

But it doesn’t teach you how to eye gouge.