MediaWatch: September 1993
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: September 1993
- Networks Promote Government-Directed Systems, Obscure Cost, Quality
- NewsBites: Execution Exaggerations
- Revolving Door: Democrat to Democrat to...
- Newsweek Says Black Families Have Only One Savior
- Post Finds "Extremists" on Right
- Glassman Breaks Myth
- Newsroom Ideology Stays Liberal
- Janet Cooke Award: CBS Sunday Morning's Jerry Bowen Portrays Church, Pope as Out of Touch
Newsweek Says Black Families Have Only One Savior
Government: The Only Solution
The black family in America may be suffering, but Newsweek's August 30 "Endangered Family" cover story suggested it's nothing that government -- and only government -- can't fix.
Newsweek General Editor Michelle Ingrassia wrote: "Emboldened by a sea change during the Reagan-Bush era, conservatives scolded, 'it's all your fault.' Dismissively this camp insisted that what blacks need are mainstream American values -- read white values. Go to school, get a job, get married, they exhorted, and the family will be just fine."
Newsweek argued "the breakdown of the African-American family resulted from rising unemployment, not falling values." In asking why black fathers are absent, Newsweek made excuses: "The biggest culprit is an economy that has locked them out of the mainstream through a pattern of bias and a history of glass ceilings." As the drug ulture grew, Ingrassia argued black men joined "as the legitimate marketplace cast them aside."
What economy is Newsweek talking about? The economy didn't swell in the Bush years, but blacks made tremendous gains in the 1980s. The liberal Joint Center for Political Studies estimated the black middle class grew by one-third from 1980 to 1988, from 3.6 million to 4.8 million.
In addition, black employment from 1982 to 1987 grew twice as fast (up 24.9 percent) as white employment. Real black median family income rose 12.7 percent from 1981 to 1987, 46 percent faster than whites. In other words, the '80s weren't a time of "rising unemployment" that "locked" black men "out of the mainstream" or where a "legitimate marketplace cast them aside."
In the same issue, Newsweek contributing editor Ellis Cose echoed Ingrassia: "Conservatives argue that government programs, by giving people something for nothing, eliminated the incentive to work in inner cities and created an amoral `culture of dependency.' That argument, I believe, is largely nonsense." Cose approvingly quoted a new study from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies claiming: "Blacks cannot `create jobs on the scale needed; nor can we restore the economy to include more jobs of moderate skill and decent pay...This is pre-eminently the work of government.'" Cose concluded: "No other entity exists to deal with so many of the problems that the United States confronts."
Newsweek's poll on "what black adults think" showed blacks disagreed. The poll asked "Which one can do most to improve the situation for black families today?" The answer: 41 percent said "black families themselves," 26 percent said "churches," and 14 percent said "community organizations." Only 14 percent said "government."
