MediaWatch: November 16, 1998
Table of Contents:
ABC's Quiet on Quotas
Covered 1997 Win, Ignored 1998 Loss
What a difference a year makes. Last year, when Houston defeated Proposition A, which would have banned the city’s racial quota program, ABC ran a full story. But a year later, when the liberal state of Washington approved a ballot measure for a statewide end to affirmative action, ABC did not air a word.
Peter Jennings announced on the November 5, 1997 World News Tonight that "in Houston, voters chose to keep in place an affirmative action program that steers city contracts to companies owned by women or minorities. The Houston decision seems to buck a trend developing in the country to reverse course on affirmative action."
Dean Reynolds followed with a report about the measure, which would have ended Houston’s policy of awarding 20 percent of all city contracts to women and minority-owned firms: "The city says that number is only a goal, not a rigid quota. But opponents of the policy, spurred by the success of the anti-affirmative action campaign in California, said the policy was biased and the time to end it had come." Reynolds explained how the opponents wrote Proposition A to "make it sound as if it were a way to end discrimination without ever mentioning the words affirmative action," but Houston Mayor Bob Lanier managed to get the wording changed, so "affirmative action" would be mentioned. Reynolds ended his piece with a denigrating comment on the conservative view: "Mayor Lanier said the choice for Houston was clear: people here had to decide whether they wanted to be viewed as a cosmopolitan, diverse, international city or, as he put it, ‘Redneckville.’"
But all ABC shows ignored Washington state voters deciding to eliminate racial and gender-based preferences by a decisive margin of 59 - 41 percent.
Two days after the election, on World News Tonight Jennings even ran down several of the ballot measures that won: "Some leftover election news, in case you missed it. Those ballot propositions on Tuesday, let’s call it citizen action on the cutting edge." Jennings ran through "citizen action" on the new cigarette tax in California, approval for medical use for marijuana in six states, and bans on cock fighting and bear wrestling in Missouri, but no mention of the citizens of Washington state rejecting quotas.
