MediaWatch: August 1995
Table of Contents:
Pushing Quotas, Spiking Critics
Victims of Fairness
When it comes to affirmative action, it seems NBC and CBS favor only racial, not political, diversity. NBC anchor Tom Brokaw fired a warning shot on the July 18 Nightly News, accusing California Gov. Pete Wilson of "playing the race and immigration cards hard," by coming out against preference policies in the California university system. On July 19, both CBS's Jacqueline Adams and NBC's Gwen Ifill focused on potential victims of the loss of government preferences, while ignoring the real-life victims of the policy itself.
CBS's Jacqueline Adams cited AT&T as a former "white man's paradise" that had the courage to change, noting, "Publicly, that support," for affirmative action, "is shared by 81 percent" of Fortune 500 companies. "Many minority businessmen, though, suffer the costs of the private view." Adams spotlighted one such "victim," printer Frank Flores. "Over the last five years, he's had to fire almost half of his largely Hispanic workforce. One reason: a major beverage company no longer felt compelled to hire him." Ifill profiled Winston Chan, "who owes his success to affirmative action....it took the federal government to jump start his ambitions with a program that set aside contracts for minorities and women." One soon saw why: Half the money Chan's company makes comes from government affirmative action contracts.
Without opposing comment, Ifill asserted that "a handful of studies conducted between 1977 and 1991, compiled by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, shows affirmative action programs have had a generally positive effect." The median black male income, she explain-ed, has risen from 60 to 74 percent of white income between 1964 and 1993.
But is improving black economic data simply a function of preferences or did other factors, like the Reagan boom, have their own impact? National Review's Ed Rubenstein cited Census Bureau data showing "from the end of 1982 to 1989, black unemployment dropped 9 percentage points (from 20.4 percent to 11.4 percent)....the median black family's income increased 15.7 percent....According to the Census Bureau, the number of black-owned businesses increased from 308,000 in 1982 to 424,000 in 1987, a 38 percent rise."
