Andrew Ferguson‘s latest “Press Man” column for Commentary magazine takes aim at a recent Washington Post headline: “Obama media pool lacks racial depth: White reporters still dominate major beat, but does it really matter?”
After joking that it’s unlikely presidential spokesman Jay Carney could find a friendlier crowd than the current White House press corps if he were speaking instead to President Obama’s daughters and their private school classmates, Ferguson addresses a more serious concern.
Buried in the headline writer’s premise is another premise, one far more insidious and pervasive. This is the racial and sexual determinism of our progressive establishment, which has absorbed the unexamined belief that how an individual man or woman thinks and what he or she does are controlled by biology — by their sex and race. It is an idea with a long and unhappy pedigree, of course, but it accounts for the obsession with a bogus definition of diversity that has become a crippling feature of life in American business, government, and education. The American media’s monomania about their own racial and sexual composition is just one example, but a telling and inescapable one. Endless conferences are held, exhausting studies are undertaken to record the melanin counts and enumerate the genital profiles of American newsrooms. Meanwhile, no one notices that the kind of diversity that truly enriches the reporting of news — a wide variety of cultural ideas, political views, and religious beliefs — is the kind of diversity that’s lacking from almost all mainstream news outlets.
