Dumb and Dumber!
Liberal Media Bias Lives! Exhibit A: "Minority Growth Slips at Top
Private Schools," read the headline on yesterday's front-page New York
Times story by Randal C. Archibold. You could have been forgiven for
muttering, "Uh oh," and thinking here was another example of the project of
racial integration collapsing. But the alarmist headline was a Nixonian
trick--Nixonian in the sense of that president's notorious declaration, while
prices were soaring in the early 1970s, that "we have slowed the rise in the
rate of inflation." Prices were still rising. The rate at which prices were
rising was still rising. Only the rate at which that rate was rising wasn't
rising anymore.
The Times headline wasn't quite that deceptive, but it was close. It
turns out that minority enrollment isn't falling. It's increasing. It was 11
percent in 1970, and 19 percent in 1990, and it's "about 21 percent" now.
What's the problem, then? It seems, Archibold ominously notes, that "the pace
of growth has slowed." But should we really expect the minority share of
enrollments not just to keep growing but to keep growing at its initial
pace ? Even in the best of all possible civil-rights environments, the
rate of increase would have to slow down sometime, wouldn't it, as minority
admissions approached a fair, non-discriminatory level? ...
It turns out there is a story buried in Archibold's piece, but it's
mostly a success story. Minority children are indeed accepted at private
schools, but even though "they can afford the steep tuition," their parents
"often choose other options, including parochial schools and a move to the
suburbs" where the public schools "have a better reputation." Isn't this
basically a heartening trend? Integrating the suburbs is arguably more
important than integrating Fieldston. At elite private schools, Archibold tells
us, minority students fear cultural isolation. They also fear becoming the
"subject of speculation" as to whether they are beneficiaries of race
preferences. Yet the overall picture is positive: The private schools are
becoming more integrated while the suburbs are becoming more integrated, too.
"Private School Minority Enrollment Holds Steady Even as Qualified Students
Move to Suburbs" would have been a more accurate headline. ...
Liberal Media Bias Lives! Exhibit B: Meanwhile, on Page B3, the
spread of half-baked faux-Dowdism continues with John Kifner's "Metro" section
story headlined "Giuliani's Hunt for Red Menaces." Kifner writes: "A decade
after the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the swift collapse of communism's
Evil Empire, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is still darkly wary of Marxist
influence in the nooks and crannies of the city." It seems the mayor didn't
like it when the leader of a dissident group of transit workers decried "an
orgy of profit-making" by New York business over Christmas. The union leader
said, "They're not going to rake it in if the trains aren't running." Giuliani
argued that that "means taking jobs away from people," and said it reflected a
"true misunderstanding of what America is all about. That comes from the
influence of Marxism, and if you need any better indication of it, it was said
at a Marxist study group."
Kifner implicitly ridicules this statement--the mayor, he says, "has
discerned a sinister Marxist tinge"--but he never explains why it's ridiculous.
Are there no Marxists left after the fall of the Wall? Was the power of Marx
and Marxism entirely bound up in the fate of Eastern Bloc capital "C"
Communism? That's not what they taught me in my Marxist study group! Has Kifner
heard of the New Left? And isn't it true that Marxists have a vision of class
conflict that is at odds with a vision (embraced by Giuliani) that sees an
"orgy of profit-making" as a good thing because everyone has an interest in
capitalist prosperity? ... Kifner doesn't even tell us whether the union
leader's statement really was "said at a Marxist study group." Giuliani
apparently must be a wacky McCarthyist paranoid regardless of whether he's
telling the truth. ... Kifner's piece makes sense only as an appeal to the
unexamined liberal (anti-anti-Communist) biases of his readers. ... A couple of
Kifner's other examples do show that Giuliani has a tendency to view any
deploring of class disparities as "Marxist." But the mayor pays Marx more
respect by recognizing that his philosophy has some meaning worth criticizing
than Kifner does by acting as if it is so dead and meaningless that anyone who
takes it seriously is a fool. ...
In the middle of his piece, Kifner veers off and makes fun of Giuliani for
having "expanded his horizon to foreign affairs last week." It seems the mayor
lamented that Fidel Castro had been "romanticized," and urged asylum for
6-year-old Elián González. And this was ridiculous because ... why, exactly?
Because Castro is a Marxist? But Giuliani didn't use the word "Marxist" to
describe Castro (though it surely would have been appropriate). He was adding
his two cents to a controversy in the news, and his position on asylum was
hardly outlandish. ...
Kifner's smug, sneering piece wasn't labeled "News Analysis." But that
wouldn't have saved it. ...
[ So the Times has a liberal bias. Isn't that an easy
target?--ed. "First shoot the fish in the barrel." Plus the Times
seems to be getting worse, playing to its target NPR demographic the same way
NBC Nightly News plays to geriatric women.]
