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Fraud at Times not due to affirmative action after all—aren’t you relieved?
Liberals shook up over the New York Times’ Jayson Blair disaster can relax: The New Republic, Andrew Sullivan, and a black columnist at the Washington Post named Terry Neal all agree that the problem was not the pursuit of diversity,—not at all!—“it was,” writes TNR, “the fetishization of diversity, which is a complete perversion of affirmative action.” [Italics added.] “Yes,” adds Sullivan, “the problem isn’t the policy as such. It’s the quixotic, arbitrary, dictatorial way in which the policy was abused.” In other words, liberalism simply went “too far” in this instance. But in a liberal society that systematically denies objective standards, what is the standard by which “too far” is determined? And how can liberals not go “too far” when the goal of equalizing blacks’ representation in intellectual professions with that of whites is their transcendent object? In other words, if your goal is (let us be frank) inherently impossible, and if you won’t accept No for an answer, then how can you not go “too far”?
To say that the fiasco was not brought about by the pursuit of racial proportionality but rather by the way in which that policy was carried out, is like saying that the economic problems of the Soviet Union were not caused by the Communist pursuit of material human equality but by “poor management.” Comments
One must remember that the folks at the Times very often took the position that the Soviet economy’s failure was indeed a failure in implementation. Leftists are remarkably consistent in their ability to deny the obvious. Posted by: Carl on May 13, 2003 7:32 PMYes, it was the old comment that “real socialism” has never been tried. In this case “real affirmative action” has never been tried. Posted by: Charles Rostkowski on May 14, 2003 9:02 AMSpeaking to the closed-door meeting of New York Times staffers yesterday, executive editor Howell Raines admitted that racial favoritism led him to promote Jayson Blair despite his record of inaccuracy and fraud: “Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts he appeared to be a promising young minority reporter. I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities…. Does that mean I personally favored Jayson? Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.” Two key points are established by Raines’s statement. First, he has unambiguously confessed—against all the denials by liberal commentators—that the desire to advance blacks at the Times was his motive for going so easy on Blair. Second, Raines’s wording indicates the falseness of the claim that it was only an ABUSE of affirmative action that led the Times into this fiasco. Affirmative action means that you are making a greater effort to advance minorities than you make for whites. That’s what Raines meant by “AGGRESSIVELY providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities,” language that irresistibly suggests a significantly lower standard for judging black performance, indeed, a radically different approach in the way one views black applicants. So, when he continued to give Blair high level assignments despite the already known, vast problems with his work, Raines was only continuing the established policy of “AGGRESSIVELY providing … career opportunities for minorities.” Thus the scandal was not due to an ABUSE of affirmative action, but to affirmative action itself. Raines’ mistake was not that he “perverted” or “fetishized” diversity, but that he pursued it in a consistent, principled manner, refusing to make an unprincipled exception. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on May 15, 2003 8:43 AMSorry for my repetitiveness on this point, but I’m trying to boil the issue down to its essentials. Affirmative action, as a matter of principle, replaces normative standards with the goal of proportional minority representation. Once that has happened, no normative standards remain in place to tell decision makers that a particular affirmative action beneficiary doesn’t make the grade. The only way to determine that a particular beneficiary is unqualified is the “gag test,” the “Now it’s gone too far” test, which is entirely subjective. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on May 15, 2003 4:13 PMHere is must reading on Jayson Blair from Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post. In 2000 Blair fictionalized an interview provided by a Times contract writer in such as way as to suggest that the interviewee had a grievance against the Firestone Tire Company, whereas in fact his complaint had been satisfactorily resolved. The contract writer complained strongly to the Times’ editors about Blair’s falsifications, and they ignored her. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62079-2003May15.html Posted by: Lawrence Auster on May 16, 2003 2:44 PM |